Presidential Election 2016

[EOst]

I really don't understand that argument. What should the media do, ignore the person who is leading the Republican polls almost 2-1?

[grant1simons2]

More attention equals creating worse things to say which leads to more attention which leads to doing worse things which... vicious cycle.

Have you ever had a bully? Same idea.

[mulad]

One problem is that it doesn't really matter whether the coverage is positive or negative. Trying to argue against something is often counterproductive, making people harden their positions.

I feel that for people who are running for president, we need to take a broad view of their policies and get a good sense of what they believe and what sort of a foundation that builds for the future.

The news media is all focused on drama, and not the good, well-thought out drama of movies or good TV -- the bad backstabbing, gossipy drama that only serves to get people riled up and push them further away from any sort of resolution. Stupid little individual gaffes shouldn't matter. Pull back and build us a whole picture.

[EOst]

So what if he's a bully, though? The fact that an obnoxious bully is leading the polls is news. It says something very important about the Republican Party and the country.

I mean, think of the corollary of the "Trump is leading because of news coverage" argument: if the media were instead relentlessly covering Bush's snoozefest rallies or Christie's New Hampshire bully-boy routine, does anyone really think they'd be averaging 35% in the polls? There are plenty of journalists who would love to move on.

[mulad]

I have taken the approach of posting articles about other candidates to my Facebook wall to counteract this trend. I'm just asking for an appropriate level of coverage. The existing situation is insane, and any journalist that keeps this up is just a drama gobbler.

[kirby96]

So what if he's a bully, though? The fact that an obnoxious bully is leading the polls is news. It says something very important about the Republican Party and the country.

I agree with this. I've basically come to the conclusion that we are witnessing the slow (multi-year or even decades) messy end of the GOP as we know it. This is clearly a huge story in which Donald Trump is playing a large part.

That said, the sensationalism and reaching to grab the 'by the minute news cycle' is distressing. This story could be told in ways that better educate people while still covering the gory details. For example, I'll bet GOP power-brokers are wishing they had ranked choice primary voting right about now, yet I haven't seen a peep in the largest news organization about how that angle is relevant here. Instead it's nothing more sophisticated than headlines along the lines of "CRAZY TRUMP LEADS POLLS!"

Of course, a news organization that tried to break that cycle would almost certainly 'lose' in terms of viewership etc.. And so my cynicism grows...

[QuietBlue]

What newsworthy things have Clinton and Sanders being doing lately, though? Should they really be getting front page coverage for giving the same stump speech in some Iowa gymnasium?

Indeed, there's no need for them to do much right now, as Trump is doing all of their work for them. They get to hang back and watch the other side implode.

[Didier]

Trump is the clear Republican front runner and he's advocating for stances almost unfathomably extreme, so you kind of have to cover him. The coverage could certainly be better, though.

The real problem is that our presidential campaigns start 18 months before the election.

[mulad]

Anyway, even if we blot out the sun of the one candidate, I'm still pretty pissed off at the balance of time with the other candidates. Bernie Sanders is currently averaging a better poll result in New Hampshire than Hillary Clinton, but he only gets a fraction of the coverage she does. Is there anything stirring up the Democratic side of the race to account for that imbalance? If anything, we should expect the media to be hyperfocused on the "insurgent" Sanders campaign, right?

[MNdible]

Bernie has already had his insurgent moment in the sun -- just look back to the beginning of this thread for all of the glowing media coverage he received.

[mulad]

Explain to me how covering candidates at a rate wholly inconsistent with their polling numbers is anything but anti-democratic.

[Didier]

Well Bernie is considerably behind Hillary just about everywhere else.

[grant1simons2]

Oh my goodness. Mulad is not arguing that Bernie needs more attention! He is arguing trump is getting way more attention than ALL the candidates.

[MNdible]

Explain to me how covering candidates at a rate wholly inconsistent with their polling numbers is anything but anti-democratic.

Explain to me how the reporting that private news organizations choose to do can be correlated to being anti-democratic.

[xandrex]

The news media is all focused on drama, and not the good, well-thought out drama of movies or good TV -- the bad backstabbing, gossipy drama that only serves to get people riled up and push them further away from any sort of resolution. Stupid little individual gaffes shouldn't matter. Pull back and build us a whole picture.

We're nearly a year out from the election with more than a dozen GOP candidates and another 3 on the Dem side. Of course the news media is going to focus on the drama. Nobody, I repeat, nobody, would give two shits about the race right now if the media wasn't playing up the drama.

The fact is, the average person doesn't care all the much about politics if it means hearing about substantive policy and issues. They snooze. They change the channel. The don't click the links. They don't care about the whole picture, especially when we haven't even decided on who the actual candidates will be.

Anyway, even if we blot out the sun of the one candidate, I'm still pretty pissed off at the balance of time with the other candidates. Bernie Sanders is currently averaging a better poll result in New Hampshire than Hillary Clinton, but he only gets a fraction of the coverage she does. Is there anything stirring up the Democratic side of the race to account for that imbalance? If anything, we should expect the media to be hyperfocused on the "insurgent" Sanders campaign, right?

Explain to me how covering candidates at a rate wholly inconsistent with their polling numbers is anything but anti-democratic.

Most progressives I knew used to quickly dismiss the results of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries because they are not representative of the United States. They're small, rural, largely white states. It's only now that progressives have a candidate leading there that they actually want to tout it. Do we need to sound trumpets and gather everyone around to proclaim the news that Bernie is leading amongst white, hyper-engaged liberals in a rural state that borders his own? (For what it's worth, nearly every—if not all—major news outlet did cover it).

I'm kind of confused how this is anti-democratic. It's the news, without the force of the government, covering what it deems newsworthy. Someone not liking how it's covered doesn't make it any less democratic. It sounds like you want something along the lines of the Fairness Doctrine for all news that would require more equal coverage of the candidates. But what more is there to report of Bernie that hasn’t already been reported? Plenty of people complain the news isn’t covering [insert pet issue here] when, in fact, they actually did. But when Trump makes comments that take us back a century, those do tend to grab the headlines.

Sanders was supported by Working Families recently. So there's one off the top of my head.

The NYT and a bunch of progressive news sites covered this. But is it really newsworthy that a obscure/niche party with no representation anywhere in the United States endorsed a candidate? Does anyone care?

Oh my goodness. Mulad is not arguing that Bernie needs more attention! He is arguing trump is getting way more attention than ALL the candidates.

Why shouldn’t Trump get more attention? He’s a leading candidate of a major party making racist statements that would normally tank someone running for office. And he isn’t losing.

[mplsjaromir]

Recommendations that the GOP made to itself in 2012 after losing are getting funnier by the day.



http://goproject.gop.com/rnc_growth_opp ... k_2013.pdf

[FISHMANPET]

The media is kind of tired of Trump, but also generally have no idea what to do with him.
http://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828086/donald-trump-media

[LakeCharles]

Oh my goodness. Mulad is not arguing that Bernie needs more attention! He is arguing trump is getting way more attention than ALL the candidates.

Anyway, even if we blot out the sun of the one candidate, I'm still pretty pissed off at the balance of time with the other candidates. Bernie Sanders is currently averaging a better poll result in New Hampshire than Hillary Clinton, but he only gets a fraction of the coverage she does. Is there anything stirring up the Democratic side of the race to account for that imbalance? If anything, we should expect the media to be hyperfocused on the "insurgent" Sanders campaign, right?

He seems to be arguing that Bernie needs more attention. Which he should get to some extent as he is the only other viable candidate in the Democratic primary. But I think the odds he wins are so low that it doesn't matter much. I think two people have endorsed him to Hillary's 100+ endorsements.

[grant1simons2]

He was giving what's called an example.

And really? 2 people? Lol.

Here's the list so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_B ... ents,_2016

[mulad]

Yes, I am arguing Trump should get less coverage. Yes, I am arguing Sanders should get more. I'm not totally stuck in stone with how I'd like the media to be behaving, but I would prefer them to act according to one of these three options:

• Give all candidates equal coverage -- call it the "socialist" option. Obviously this is difficult with a field this large.
• Give candidates an amount of coverage that is roughly proportional to their polling averages
• Use a tiered system where leading candidates get most coverage (still balanced according to one of the two methods above) while coverage of lower-rung candidates is on a more rotational or ad-hoc basis.

As I said before, if you look at the whole electorate, Trump is in third place behind the two Democratic candidates. Why give the the guy with the bronze(r) the vast majority of coverage?

Yes, we are a long way out from the general election, but the caucuses matter, and the first ones happen on February 1st. Local news coverage is often pretty poor. I dunno, maybe Iowa and New Hampshire have supremely awesome political reporters? National outlets have far more resources, though I may give them too much credit. Sanders is a point or two ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire. That counts for something.

I'll never forget 2004 when John Kerry ended up the Democratic nominee. That election felt like it was entirely pushed through by the party elites. Maybe things still would have turned out the same way even if coverage had been better for other candidates in the primary race, but I don't know. The Democratic leadership is still trying to hide Sanders from as many eyeballs as possible by scheduling debates and other events at times when people are unlikely to watch. They're manipulating the system, and the media gives them a free pass.

If we believe that journalists are supposed to leave their biases at the door, then why isn't coverage more balanced?