See What the Media is Covering & Why It Matters

The website www.journalism.org is sponsored by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Its website has a lot of interesting information. One of the items on the website is a survey of what stories are appearing in newspapers, television, cable television, and the Internet. You can read the latest survey here. What the latest survey shows is that the 2008 presidential campaign gets more attention from news organizations than Iraq policy. Which, of course, exemplifies the problem with the media in America.

Several years ago a journalism professor named Thomas Patterson wrote a book about the way the media covered the 1992 presidential campaign. One of things he pointed out was that while the public looks at political reporting from a governing schema, the media looks at political reporting from a campaign schema. This is a critical difference. The public wants information on the candidates so that voters can decide who to vote for and what they will do if elected. The media, however, wants to look at political reporting from a campaign schema. Reporters looking at the campaign from such a schema are going to focus on such things as tactics and fundraising but not on the issues or what the candidates will do once elected.

Why this difference? Because in the final analysis it is a lot easier, and probably more fun, to cover the campaign than it is to cover what a candidate actually says about the issues.