Sex Sells
In regard to today’s story about John McCain in The New York Times, Kelly McBride, an ethicist with Poynter, opened her remarks this way:
Within minutes of posting a long story on Sen. John McCain’s ethical blindspots Wednesday evening, The New York Times’ Web site was gathering hundreds of comments. Although the thrust of the story was an examination of the Republican candidate’s mixed record on moral and ethical choices, that’s not what most readers will take away.
There’s a very good reason why readers do not take away from this article that it’s an otherwise entirely fair and appropriate “examination of the Republican candidate’s mixed record on moral and ethical choices”: The New York Times led with sex.
You don’t have to be a journalism major or have taken a media literacy class to know that the first thing a newspaper tells you (i.e. the lead paragraphs) are what it thinks is the most important information in the story or the most important context in which to understand the story.
The New York Times led with sex!
McBride is 100 percent correct:
The Times’ story is about McCain’s contradictory nature. But leading and ending with the most salacious example of that contradiction guarantees that as the story is retold today, it will become a question of whether McCain had an affair.
Public Editor Clark Hoyt needs to address this article in his Sunday column. (Ed. Note: I sent Hoyt e-mail this morning asking him to address it.)
I’ll be interested in the rationalizations for this choice. To get a jump on why such things occur, I suggest you check out the structural biases of journalism.
UPDATE: An inside look at this story from The New Republic.
UPDATE: Apparently NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller doesn’t understand that “facts” presented in journalism always exist in a context that journalism itself creates.
UPDATE: CJR has five questions for Bill Keller.
sex sells clothing, cigarettes, alcohol, automobiles, cologne. Why shouldn’t it sell newspapers, too?
The real story is not that he might or might not have had an affair, but about his relationships with telecommunications lobbyists and savings and loan lobbyists. That is boring. But an affair? That sells papers/