Stealing from Ezra in Bulk

This is good:

I think one aspect of the modern press that doesn't get enough attention -- either among folks in the media or folks critiquing it -- is the transition from the fundamental scarcity being information to information being in abundance and the fundamental scarcity being mediation. For instance, the attitude on display in this Marc Ambinder post is fully understandable if you take a newspaperman's attitude towards the whole thing. If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.

But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to. It's sort of like a TV show: If Friends had had an episode where Ross and Rachel hooked up, but never mentioned it again, that would've been weird, but their tryst wouldn't have been a big part of the story. Since they mentioned it all the time, and came back to it, and fit future events into that context, it was a big story. Similarly, if the press reports something and never mentions it again, the public knows to forget it. It's not important. If they mention it constantly -- "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" -- they know it is important. The job of the media, in other words, is now to also emphasize the right parts of the story.

This requires deciding what matters. And on this, people have different opinions. Take the Bridge to Nowhere, which Ambinder mentions in his post. I think it's important that one of the central arguments the McCain campaign is making for Palin is a lie. I think that should be reported a lot, at least as often as the McCain campaign repeats it, and then if the McCain campaign doesn't stop repeating it, their lying should be emphasized a lot, because that's also important. On the level of first order principles, I know the press agrees with me, because they did this with John Kerry. The crucial problem in this discussion comes here: The press isn't allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can't transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.

It also gives rise to a more fundamental incoherence at the center of contemporary campaign reporting: Ambinder waves this media conversation away as a "Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press" because he thinks of all this as media criticism. But this isn't about the press, it's about the campaign. And he's the guy we all look to for that type of coverage. His job is to report on the motivations and actions and effects of the major political players in the election (and he's among the best at it). But there is arguably no political player as important in the election as the aggregate media. But the media won't report on itself. Which means they can't really report on the campaign: They can only report on the campaign-minus-the-media, which is an impossible thing to do, and requires them to invent all sorts of explanations for how the things that they're doing are happening. This tends to take the form of an imaginary median voter whose interests and opinions they imagine are driving their coverage and who is thus the real actor in the election, but it makes everything extremely meta, erodes any measure of accountability, and demands that a lot of coverage present itself as willfully obtuse.