Standards

I'm not sure what Matthew Yglesias has been "scanning" today, but it seems to me that there are actually very few "media people" (though I'm not exactly sure who that encompasses) arguing "that the performance of the debate moderators was, in fact, very good."  Tom Shales at The Washington Post said they "turned in shoddy, despicable performances."  The editor of The American Journalism Review said the questioning was "a vivid illustration of what is so wrong with so much that passes for political coverage today."  The editor of Editor & Publisher pronounced it "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years."  A writer for The Columbia Journalism Review argued that "this debate was among the worst, if not the bottom of the lot" and that it was "largely the fault of ABC News."  Time magazine's Michael Grunwald seemed to agree, as did (perhaps predictably) various lefty observers.  With the exception of David Brooks -- who ridiculously argued that ABC's questions "were excellent" -- I'm not really seeing any media observers defend Gibson and Stephanopoulos' performance last night.

Yglesias also says he's had "a million conversations navel-gazing conversations [sic] about the decline of 'old media' like newspapers, magazines, and network television and never once has anyone suggested that declining audience might be in any way related to the quality of the product."  In fact, there are serious media observers who very clearly argue that the quality of the product is correlated with the industry's fortunes.  In this year's State of the News Media, from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the authors argued for the second year in a row that if you reduce news investment, people eventually flee because the product gets so bad.  (See "News Investment," here.)  Michael Massing wrote a whole article in an obscure publication called The New York Review of Books titled "The Press: The Enemy Within."

In some ways, this ties in with my earlier item on James Fallows.  I'm hardly suggesting that everyone needs to obsess over media commentary -- most of it's bad anyway -- but the fact that you don't read it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Update: Howard Kurtz, who has a rep in the liberal blogosphere for being an apologist for elite media, surveys the reaction to the debate's moderators.  He (or "Even he") notes that "it is rare for ostensibly neutral media writers and television columnists to pile on with such fervor" and that, although "[s]ome commentators praised ABC's handling of the debate," "the critics were far more vocal."  Indeed, he seems to have had trouble finding neutral supporters.  He comes up with the aforementioned Brooks; Laura Ingraham, who has an obvious and partisan interest in seeing Obama subjected to idiotic questions about his "character"; and Jake Tapper, who, um, works for ABC News.

Comments

[Sir Charles]

I think what Matt is getting at is that the "journalists" themselves see little problem with their performance. I am acquainted with a number of more or less "A list" journalists -- without going into what the A stands for -- and they are the least introspective, self-critical group I've ever met. Christ, they make lawyers look deep.

[Ankush]

Who are these unnamed "journalists"? The same people Yglesias saw when he was "scanning"? For some reason when people do media criticism, the most elementary rules of argument -- like naming actual people who say the things you're arguing against -- often get thrown out the window.

[bend]

I agree with everything you've said here. So as a friend you should know, you've made a very strong enemy today.

[Ankush]

bend: Glad you agree with me. As to the second part, well, first, whatever the post indicates, I think highly enough of Yglesias that I hope he doesn't make enemies so easily; second, he probably doesn't care about what I think; and third, in my experience, I've seen exactly the opposite response from smart people I've criticized -- far from thinking ill of me, I've often gotten very thoughtful and unsolicited responses (mostly in private e-mails). Finally, it is what it is: I could be wrong in my perception of things about the merits of the subject of our posts, but my evidence is better than no evidence, and I try not to hold back if I think something I've read is bad.

[Sir Charles]

Ankush,

I would rather not name them because they are people with whom I come into contact in varying degrees, and some, als, are friends -- but they are writers on major editorial pages, news magazines, reporters on television news and commercial political blogs. They cling to a ridiculous notion of what objectivfity is and they have a political world view in which the conventional wisdom is so deeply ingrained and where policy options are so manifestly constrained that everything in essence defaults to a conservaitve, market driven approach. Their policy expertise is deeply limited; what little exposure they get tends to be through think tankers who share the same weaknesses. It's one of the reasons they love the silly horse race stuff -- they can grasp it and regurgitate more conventional wisdom.

[Ankush]

SC: I didn't mean to question your claim, but I just meant to point out that no one has actually named a person (besides Brooks, who I named) who holds the view on this specific issue that people are suggesting.

[Sir Charles]

Ankush,

I think you're correct that Brooks may be one of the few who has been an open cheerleader for the debate. I suspect, without having had any contact with people on this specific issue, that many in the Washington journalistic community would defend what went on. I base this on the kind of coverage that they tend to like and the fact that a good chunk of the community is either bored with or not terribly conversant in policy matters.

[drsteveb]

you are missing the point that most people don't read the media critic columns. If they read or watch political news at all, they read the front page story in their newspaper, radio or tv new programming. All of those led with the uncritical/unanalyzed "Obama gets bashed over preacher/Ayers/flag pin, etc." What made the general news was the debate as it was presented by ABC. Not that what was presented was crap.

[Ankush]

drsteveb: I agree that most people don't read those columns and that straight news stories presenting what transpired at the debate will not convey its awfulness. That, however, is not what Yglesias' post was about; it was about unnamed "media people" who were supposedly "lecturing the audience that, contrary to the opinions of the people who watched the debate last night, that the performance of the debate moderators was, in fact, very good." He continued, "The press, once again, gives itself a standing ovation and that's what matters." The two or three people you can point to who actually defended the moderators -- again, all people I named, not any of the zero people Yglesias named -- do not constitute "the press."

What's striking here is that this sort of near-unanimous disapproval of a news organization's performance, from within the industry, is actually exceedingly rare. One could have reasonably predicted what Yglesias and Charles seem to think actually happened, but unfortunately, their evidenceless arguments seem to contradict the facts.