Salon.com > Jay Rosen

Why campaign coverage sucks

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:33:00 +0000

Just so you know, "the media" has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not "get behind" candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy... or gal. Nor does it "buy" this line or "swallow" that one. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn't know what it's doing.

1. The Herd of Independent Minds

This does not mean you cannot blame the media for things. Go right ahead! Brainless beasts at large in public life can do plenty of damage; and later on -- when people ask, "What happened here?" -- it sometimes does make sense to say... the beast did this. It's known as "the pack" in political journalism, but I prefer "the herd of independent minds" (from Harold Rosenberg, 1959) because I think it's more descriptive of the dynamic. Mark Halperin of Time's The Page (more about him later) calls the beast The Gang of 500. But gangs have leaders, which means a mind.

That's more than you can say about the media.

Nullifying the press

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:02:00 +0000

Scott McClellan was a different kind of press secretary, sent to do a different job than the one people had done from that podium before. Instead of grouping him with a succession of other White House spokesmen, a line to which he does not belong, we have to take McClellan's job, call it a piece of the puzzle, and place it alongside other pieces until we recognize the larger political strategy he was a part of.

He's gone; the policy -- strategic noncommunication -- may still be in place.

First, McClellan was a necessary figure in what I have called "rollback" -- the attempt to downgrade the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country. It had once been accepted wisdom that by carefully "feeding the beast" an administration would be rewarded with better coverage in the long run. Rollback, the policy for which McClellan signed on, means not feeding but starving the beast, while reducing its effectiveness as an interlocutor with the president and demonstrating to all that the fourth estate is a joke.

Neil Postman: A civilized man in a century of barbarism

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 19:30:00 +0000

I have no count, but I sense a dwindling number of people in the academic world who are unclassifiable. Neil Postman, who died Sunday, was one, and now we can say he will always be one. Such figures -- with reputation but no real discipline -- have a tendency to make people think. Postman had that.

He was expert in nothing. Therefore nothing was off limits. Therefore one's mind was always at risk, from a joke, a headline, an idea, a person walking through the door. The only way to respond to such strange conditions was with ready humor. And humor would bring you more ideas. Now what discipline, what department is that?

Everyone who knew Postman -- and I include perhaps a hundred thousand who only heard him speak -- knew him first through humor, which was the reflection in person of the satire in most of his books, each of which is a pamphlet, an essay between covers. "The Disappearance of Childhood" (1982) was satire about the infantilization in American culture. "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985) was satire about entertainment and what it was doing to us. "Technopoly" (1993) was satire on the "surrender of culture to technology." One of the first journals he was associated with was Monocle (long gone), a magazine of political satire, which is where he met Victor Navasky, publisher of the Nation, which is how he came to serve on the Nation's board, even though he was the world's worst leftist and couldn't stomach the right. Of course, in all the satire there was Neil's sermon, but again: What discipline is that?