I thought this would not be about the Future of Newspapers. I was looking at the Detroit Free Press headline today, Jan. 9, 2007, that would have us readers believe that “Clinton, McCain win in night of comebacks” with the subhead, “New Hampshire victories cool red-hot Obama, stun Romney.”
As I opened the Free Press and pushed the button on the coffee maker, I assumed that Hillary Clinton must have left some double-digit dust for Barack Obama to chew on in yesterday’s New Hampshire primary.
“Hillary Clinton scored a stunning victory over Barack Obama on Tueday,” wrote the Free Press Washington correspondent.
The reality, muffled a few paragraphs down, is that Clinton topped Obama by three percentage points, 39 to 36 percent. If anyone got trounced, it was John Edwards, with 17 percent of the vote.
But this article, little different from stories in the elite New York Times, gives Edwards little thought. Maybe that’s why he trails so far behind.
My first thought was that this was not about the Future of Newspapers, because this is the typical horse-race writing we’ve come to expect from newspapers for generations.
A rational person would hardly interpret a three-percentage point spread between two candidates as a “stunning” victory for one and dramatic defeat for another. If this had been an opinion poll, the margin of error might have been as much as five percentage points, in which case a three percent difference would mean nothing.
Let’s step back a mnute. What did I write about in that last paragraph? A “rational” person? Are political correspondents rational people? Hardly. They are too busy comparing notes with each other, building each other’s expectations, to remember that the people they are writing down to are also the ones who buy their papers. Well, some buy them. More and more read the papers for free on the web. Maybe it’s not just because those readers cheap. Maybe they at last are realizing the value of what they get in their paper newspapers and rejecting the talking-head political correspondents who do more to build each other’s expectataions than to interpret to us lowly early morning coffee drinkers what is actually happening in the world of national politics.
In short, they are writing for their own class of political writers, shoring up each other’s fantasies and forgetting the reality. The reality is that the so-called victories of Republicans and Democrats have occurred in states with minuscule populations. It is the hype that lends these early primaries importance all out of realistic perspective.
Who is creating the hype?
Why, those very institutions that, as we know, are struggling for survival. Wouldn’t you think they’d hear themselves bleating the same old horse-race blather? Wouldn’t you think the pundits would realize maybe their customers or potential customers or FORMER customers have gotten sick of putting their heads to these thundering ear trumpets and are turning to Internet alternatives out of desperation or worse — boredom?
So this column IS about the Future of Newspapers, after all. Because if reporters and editors don’t figure out that dishing up the same-old, same-old political palaver that worked in their distant past is as phony as it is fantastical,and moreover doesn’t serve readers the reality they deserve, they can kiss their future good-bye.
Contact me at joelthurtell(a)gmail.com
