Amartya Sen, who has a new book out on justice, once said that one of the biggest problems with colonialism is that it caused the colonized to reject anything which worked in the metropole. Of course this lead to all the failures of Third Worldism and other such movements both here in the Caribbean and all throughout the developing world. However there is another corollary which is often acknowledged but in a reactionary manner: we also have a habit of aping the worst of what happens abroad and much of it is reflected in our political discourse. While we examine how media operates overseas, we should learn not only how they relate to the culture of the places they either originate or serve but we should also take advantage of the critiques of media made by observers in those very places. This will make us more enlightened consumers of the news as well as better practitioners.

Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize, aka the Nobel Prize in Economics, and New York Times Op-Ed columnist, wrote a few months ago about the perils of the horse-race coverage of the ongoing healthcare debate, a pet peeve of his since the 2004 US Presidential Election. Krugman lamented that “ . . . We’re having a crucial national policy debate in which the great bulk of the news coverage tells people nothing at all about the policy issues.” Horse-race journalism in large part is a creator of the mass media, particularly television. Essentially, it is a type of journalism that is interested primarily with political ramifications as opposed to more substantive effects.

Therefore this journalism is concerned with polls, ratings, feedback, ‘game-changers’ and all sorts of reactions. In some cases, this happens because the journalist assumes a familiarity with the issues at hand and thus doesn’t seek to clearly explain them; but what happens more often, is that for the journalist, the content of plans, proposals and what not are superficial in comparison to their political impact. For a glaring example, think of the way that the annual Estimates of Expenditure are covered, and by extension received; the budget debate is viewed purely for the political mileage gained not even from the budget itself but from the presentations, which more often than not are only tangentially related to any real critique of the bill itself. When it comes to discussions of universal healthcare, housing policy, crime and a host of other issues, our discussions only go as deep as reciting statements from various government officials. Other issues that don’t have obvious political ramification like the education system are ignored. We are not terribly interested in energy policy but gas prices, which are more easily exploited, get paid lots of attention.

The current Washington Post Ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, wrote on August 30th that “by gravitating toward controversies” such as the recent boisterous town hall meetings on health care, he said, the media may “unwittingly” be allowing coverage to be shaped by evocative rhetoric and images.” In the same article he quotes Trudy Lieberman, a contributing editor to Columbia Journalism Review, who has been tracking coverage of the healthcare debates: “The politics has been covered, but all of this is flying totally over the heads of people. . .They have not known from Day One what this was about.”

The reason horse-race journalism is so popular is in large part because it is easy to do; for the most part, doesn’t require the journalist to try to achieve a level of expertise with any topics and also allows them to avoid taking definite assertion on anything. It allows for journalists to continually generate fresh headlines which of course help boost sales. Electoral success then becomes the standard by which performance is gauged, which is merely an extension of the very pernicious belief that in politics, perception is reality. While this view may be true for the layman, journalists should hold themselves to a higher standard. (I should also add parenthetically that we often act as if the terms evenhanded, fair and objective all mean the same thing but they don’t.)

This shift to personality driven coverage affects us because journalists for one aren’t necessarily good judges of character nor are they able to accurately grasp personalities. Even the few issues which are discussed, like crime, are often left as prey to demagogues. Our talk-shows are essentially monologues with call-in segments attached and too often, they get bogged down airing the views of the hoi polloi, which may vary greatly in terms of quality. An over emphasis on personality also leads us to spend too much time on rather trivial concerns, like gaffes and other through away statements. (I should of course dutifully note that Kinsley said that a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth but I’m not sure our gang deserves that much credit.)

What happens here is that we end up mixing up ends and means. For example, some claim to not want to make any comparisons on policy but instead seek to adhere to the standard of good governance. The problem here is that, outside of the broad frameworks of accountability and transparency, the term good governance is difficult to define and is in many cases little more than cheap buzzword. While it is relatively easy to make an assessment of whether proper channels are followed, what is more difficult and important is the efficacy of a specific policy decision.

As always, there is interplay between the journalists and the politicians: despite the rhetoric, the style of journalism practiced is as much a reflection of the political culture as the conduct of the politicians themselves. Although we often hear talk about conducting campaigns on a higher level, ultimately the politicians have no incentive to discuss meaningful issues because there is no political gain, nor do the journalists have much incentive to examine the issues since it requires more work and since they take their queue from the politicians, see relatively little benefit to doing so.

The corollary to the horse-race journalism is the Permanent Campaign, a term which was created by Patrick Caddell in 1977, when he was a young pollster for the Carter Administration. In a 62-page memo, he laid a governing framework. He wrote “The old cliché about mistaking style for substance usually works the reverse in politics . . . Too many good people have been defeated because they tried to substitute substance for style; they forgot to give the public the kind of visible signals that it needs to understand what is happening.”

Therefore, we end up in situation where not only is good public relations seen as being essential to a good government, it is seen as the raison d’etre, the heart of everything which drives governing. As a matter of
fact, it has become accepted that many commentators assess a government on how good its PR operations are, as if it was just another essential duty of government like fixing the roads. The natural result of this is that governments, much like the oppositions in these parts, constantly seek to win the news cycle by manipulating coverage. And of course, nothing does it better than a well placed investigation. . .
This creates an environment where it is more important to be seen doing good with the results being of relatively negligible importance.

Therefore, government officials are unwilling to acknowledge wrongdoing, even when it is relatively benign, and reflectively fall back into a defensive herd mentality thus causing problems to spiral out of control. (The past government’s handling of the Walter Francois and McDoom issues are textbook examples of this mentality.) This defensive posture often insulates the political directorate and, ironically, ends up distorting the feedback loop, making them impervious to criticism, especially if it’s positive. Since you can’t win an election unless you have absolute confidence in your campaign, governments in permanent campaign mode are often unreflective, disturbingly lacking in doubt and quite often delusional. This is how the Bush White House could derisively refer to those members of ‘the reality-based community’ even as they exploited security concerns for political gain and pettily outed Valerie Plame because her husband, Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed critical of some of their report intelligence.

Once we are conscious of concepts like that of horse-race journalism and the permanent campaign, then we can become more discerning consumers of news since we will be better able to understand why the media and government are the way they are and thus be able to hold them both to a higher standard of accountability.