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Got an email from @nytimes, and I'm reminded that the problem w. elite coverage of US political life is systemic, not bad individual actors.
@llerer is ot a bad reporter. But when she says "“ I do think voters like to know what they’re getting with a candidate..."
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@llerer is ot a bad reporter. But when she says "“ I do think voters like to know what they’re getting with a candidate..."
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2/ Lerer complains that "I’m not sure this convention answered that question”--what policies Biden would advance, beyond simply being not-Trump.
There are at least 2 problems with this. 1 is that she acknowledges that Warren, Bill Clinton and Biden addressed exactly that...
There are at least 2 problems with this. 1 is that she acknowledges that Warren, Bill Clinton and Biden addressed exactly that...
3/ I mean--when Biden himself tells you what he's going to do, echoing many others who talked about everything from child care to climate change (and pandemic response!) it seems like willed ignorance to say that the DNC audience doesn't know what they would get w. a Biden win...
4/ The second problem is that there is, as always, much more to a convention than the headline speeches. The DNC and the RNC both express significant policy programs, in the platforms, working groups etc.--the stuff that reporters cover but that isn't prime time fodder...
5/ That's where print reporters could or should dominate their TV rivals. There's an interesting piece on the form a Biden administration will take, based on reporting from the convention, for example, with policy emphases and all that (lost the link; sorry)...
6/ The headline claims in prime time take on meat and bone in that work--and again, that's the stuff of great print stories. Instead, Lerer's claim, undercut as it is by her own qualifications of it, is an example of the La Brea tar pit of modern elite political journalism...
7: It's a kind of bad theater criticism, of the sort @jayrosen_nyu among many others have decried. (It's also a species of the kind of book review I most hate: the "this book isn't the one I would have written" diss, but that's just my pet peeve)...
8: Instead of engaging with the significant amount of often complex material that goes into understanding, expressing and then analyzing policy claims, Lerer (again, an example, not the true object of my critique) retreats to the easy and familiar for her story line...
9/ "Did Biden do enough of "x" to persuade the hypothetical average voter?"
And here, at last, we get (to think I slapped Bill Clinton for logorrhea!) to the root problem: top-tier political journalism is failing in the US because it frames its beat wrongly...
And here, at last, we get (to think I slapped Bill Clinton for logorrhea!) to the root problem: top-tier political journalism is failing in the US because it frames its beat wrongly...
10/ It asks a set of questions that exclude too many of the answers that are, in fact, not just material but vital to its audience, the US civic public, if they--we--are to understand the implications and likely consequences of our political choices...
11/ That is, Lerer could have asked: what did this convention tell us about a Biden presidency, beyond it's being not-Trump's? That would be an interesting take from a well informed and connected reporter--and not, really, that different from the one she posed...
12: but you'll note that the answer it permits (along with the work required to come up with such an answer) is much changed from the easy, glib, basically false and certainly misleading remark she tossed off--in the email I received and in a story prominent now at @nytimes. /fin
