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I just saw someone make reference to “Hillary was over-prepared.” To me, that represents a huge problem with political coverage of politics.
Political journalists *anticipate*, with reason, that many voters are dopes who respond to emotional messaging more than to competence. 1/
Political journalists *anticipate*, with reason, that many voters are dopes who respond to emotional messaging more than to competence. 1/
But *then* the journalists report as if competence is actually a bad thing. Because they report strictly from a horse-race anticipation perspective, not from a “here’s how the candidates performed on the issues or job-skills” perspective. 2/
Consequently, they *validate* the emotional response judgment, *insert* their anticipation of what the emotional response will be, and *exponentialize* the importance of emotional response vs other considerations.
I mean, it’s a terrible function to have the pundits sitting there making their predictions of how the audience will emotionally respond. Why not just comment on the *meaning* of what was *said* and help the audience digest that? 4/
Instead, they basically tell the audience what they *guess* the audience *feels* which kind of manipulates the audience toward feeling what they guess the audience feels. It’s idiotic.
A few people are commenting on misogyny. *definitely* misogyny infused the coverage of Clinton, and this particular comment was an intersection of that and what I’m talking about here, but what I’m talking about here is a style of political reporting that is more generalized 6/
You can see it in the commentary on Trump and other men candidates too. Guessing the audience response rather than coverage of content.
Misogyny definitely comes out in the response-guessing though.
