I don't like (too much) broccoli, either

Transparently wrestling with finding answers for The Gonzo Primary, upending campaign coverage and finding a new way.

Photo by Steve Shreve on Unsplash

IOWA CAUCUS COUNTDOWN: 360 DAYS

Transparency is not something that journalists, ironically, have been great at. While we push institutions and leaders for transparency, our process is often opaque. I don’t think it’s necessarily a deliberate thing. It’s more that we know our process, take it for granted and, to some degree rightly, don’t want to make ourselves the story.

As someone who plans to stay in a field that is becoming imperiled because of the broader transformation of the way we communicate — i.e. anyone can and should be a publisher now — I think journalistic process has to become part of the story. Not the story but what goes into the sausage is a way we can build community, increase dialogue and trust, and show that the work is careful and deliberate.

This new newsletter and project, loosely formed around the idea of The Gonzo Primary, is a work in progress.

And I plan to be public about the progress part of that work.

So why do this? And how will we (and I do mean we, as I don’t want or intend to do this alone) measure success? This comes at the right time because there is a healthy debate about trying to force media out of its comfort zone of horse race coverage, while some encourage an eat-your-vegetables approach and others defend the status quo.

I think there’s a middle ground. Figuring out what’s happening inside campaigns and who’s up and who’s down isn’t wholly horrible. It’s the herd mentality of it all — and the collective focus on entertainment and “newness” that leads to media groupthink that has pushed issues off into a dark corner and the same tired storylines at various junctures of the campaign — that becomes an all-encompassing force and allows anyone, even those candidates with severe deficiencies, to fill the vacuum.

It’s what steamrolls elections and election coverage because of inertia instead of cause. As professor and media critic Jay Rosen put it:

Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyu

Part of the reason for the inertia is that the horse race still has advantages that pop up around its massive and burned-out core. It serves the junkies, creates instant newsroom consensus on approach, makes for cheap drama, and spreads risk because everyone else is doing it. 5/

 

Rosen believes media should adopt a “citizens agenda,” which was already modeled in 1992 by the Charlotte Observer, the newspaper which gave me my start in journalism. Interestingly, Observer political reporter Jim Morrill largely disagrees. He argues that campaigns are highly scripted affairs with massive budgets to sculpt polished policy positions and answers, let along public personas. I would add, too, that while politicians’ positions on issues matter, they can’t be the only consideration. We all know candidates for office either 1) lie or 2) change their minds when they’re actually governing.

(There are too many examples to list off of but the ones that come to mind are “Keep your doctor…” and “Read my lips…” and “Mexico will pay for it…”). So measurements of a candidate’s character and the judgments we make about how they run their campaign — including how much money they raise and from whom — are as valuable as what they say their policy positions are. Which is why I thought that criticism of Elizabeth Warren drinking a beer on Instagram was petty but the Huffington Post’s well-sourced scoop about how badly not-yet-announced presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar treats her staff is a solid and necessary consideration for voters.

The Gonzo Primary will be about getting beyond the daily news cycle, into real lives and issues and, gonzo style, at the absurdity of it all perhaps with a tinge of Studs Terkel’s everyman to bring it down to size. The horse race will be in the zeitgeist already, there’s no sense in ignoring it completely.

Morrill writes that, in 1992, Observer readers complained that coverage of questions that pushed for specific policy answers and righteous grading of candidates on policy positions left too much tasteless broccoli in the newspaper every day.

I see a middle ground emerging; or, if not emerging, something for me and what I hope will be a band of miscreants to hop on board the gonzo train. Coverage can indeed be shaped around a citizen’s agenda, but perhaps not as mechanically as Rosen suggests. Can we cover the absurdity and spectacle of the horse race while diving deep where we need to on the issues that really matter? Can we acknowledge media hysteria while trying to stay out of it?

We’ll need to make choices to do so. And that’s what we’ll start to build toward, next. DMs and email always open.