Covering the campaign
Americans believe that the news media does not provide enough coverage of the most important information about the (presidential) candidates and provides too much coverage of the least important information. In fact, the more important the American people believe an area of press coverage is, the less they say the press is providing coverage of it. In contrast, the less important they believe an area of coverage is, the more they believe they are seeing
too much of it.
That's from a new study by the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard.
You might be surprised to learn that I agree with many of the survey results. We do a pretty lousy job of helping you choose the best person to lead the country. (Of course, the survey also says that you don't trust the information we provide anyway so that probably doesn't matter.)
* Almost everyone polled say candidate policy plans are important to them, and almost two-thirds say we're not doing well providing it
* Same with candidates' personal values: They're important, and we're not providing coverage
* Coverage of negative campaign ads bore you, and we provide to much of it
* Gotcha moments for candidates aren't important, but we focus on them
Makes me proud.
In one sense, I have some distance from the indictments of the report. We don't cover the presidential campaign on our own; we use wire services. Additionally, "news media" is such a loaded, universal term these days that it's hard to feel connected to it. (Or maybe it's easy to justify the disconnect.) When you say news media, do you mean Fox News or CBS? Do you Inside Edition or Bill O'Reilly? Do you mean Oprah or Jon Stewart? Do you mean Daily Kos or Michelle Malkin? Do you mean the News & Record or The New York Times?
I watch the same television news programs you do. (Yes, I will watch me some Fox News as much as I watch CNN.) I may read a bit more because it's part of my job, but given that I don't disagree with the crux of the survey, the issue is moot.
Still, we select the wire stories we use. This information should inform our selection.
One issue we will have to get a handle on is frequency. We can drop most of the horse race stories without much trouble. We can drop most of the gotcha stories, too. (Has the debate coverage shed any light other than gotcha moments and horse race speculation?)
But if we do a page on the candidates' positions on immigration and you miss the paper that day, you and I disagree on how well we do it. So, presumably we need to print more in-depth pieces more often?
If you don't care about the news media, but do care about politics, the report also shows some interesting differences in the way Democrats and Republicans look at candidate attributes and qualifications.