I tried to ignore the 2016 presidential campaign.
On the grounds that our presidential campaigns start too soon and last too long.
On the grounds that the obsession with who’s up and who’s down – despite years and years of criticism of the shallowness of poll-driven “horserace” journalism – drains newsroom resources and public attention away from more pressing problems.
On the grounds that I will almost certainly vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, rather than for the Republican nominee, whoever it is, because I won’t support anyone who lacks the guts to buck the NRA, the climate change deniers, the xenophobes, or the guys who rob us with a fountain pen, as Woody Guthrie put it.
After a while, though, political news becomes like the Top 40 songs of my youth. It seeps into our brains even when we think we’re ignoring it.
I got sucked into Campaign ‘16 when the early success of Donald Trump goaded his Republican rivals into ever more outrageous pronouncements. In spite of myself, I started watching their debates for the sheer fun of hearing what bonehead thing the candidates would say next.
The most outrageous pronouncements, alas, are voiced out on the campaign trail, when a candidate tries to whip a friendly crowd into a froth.
Trump, of course, is better at this than anyone, which is why he leads both in the polls and in the amount of press he is receiving. That ability to whistle up news coverage is driving Bernie Sanders supporters crazy.
One Bernie fan of my acquaintance steered me to a study that found that as of the end of November, the old Big Three of broadcast TV had devoted a combined 234 minutes of their nightly newscasts to Trump since the start of the year. Sanders’ total for the same time period: 10 minutes.
Washington Post writer Callum Borchers offered one simple explanation for the coverage gap: Trump is leading the Republican field. Bernie is trailing Hillary Clinton by a wide margin.
It’s like football, Borchers wrote. A contending team in one division is going to get more coverage than a cellar dweller in another, even if the two teams have the same record.
For those who think coverage of politics is already way too much like coverage of sports, this was entirely the wrong thing to say.
Borchers would have done better to address the self-fulfilling aspect of news outlets devoting more coverage to the frontrunners than to those who are chasing them: How does a trailing candidate gain on the leaders if news outlets only pay attention to him if he’s leading?
A more obvious explanation for Trump’s early dominance is that outrageousness works. I keep hearing that at a certain point, he will go too far and be forced to withdraw in disgrace. Perhaps.
To date, though, every time Trump seems to have gone too far – about Mexicans, about women, about Muslims – his poll numbers have spiked and his ravings have landed at the top of the news. So he keeps raving.
Bernie, on the other hand, keeps giving variations on the same speech, as candidates tend to do when they’re on the campaign trail. After all, if every audience is hearing your stump speech for the first time, why compose a new one?
But when editors ask their road-weary reporters if Bernie said anything newsworthy today, the jaded scribes probably say, “Nope, same old same old.”
This might be particularly so with Sanders because he so single-mindedly hammers away at his twin themes of corporate greed and the ever-expanding income gap between the super rich and everyone else. When The New York Times asked people in Sanders’ adopted hometown of Burlington, Vermont, to offer their best Bernie impression, several just uttered the words “millionaires and billionaires” in a Brooklyn accent.
On the other hand, the reporters assigned to Bernie may be so wedded to the narrative of Sanders as the millionaires-and-billionaires guy that they don’t even notice when he says something new.
My own response to the counting of broadcast minutes was to do a little counting of my own. I went to The New York Times’ website, searched for “Bernie Sanders,” and limited the search to staff-written news stories devoted specifically to Bernie in the past 30 days. I found two.
One was about his tenure as mayor of Burlington. The other was a look at his views, over time, on gay rights.
During the same month, The Times published a dozen staff-written stories about Clinton and 15 about Trump.
I fired off an email to The Times’ public editor in hopes that she’ll ask the paper’s honchos to account for the disproportionate coverage of the frontrunners.
If I hear back from her, I’ll let you know.
