Obama, Clinton and the Perils of “Gameshow Journalism”

Barack Obama has had a very unpleasant April says Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall report. Well, that’s hardly new news. But Tyndall isn’t talking about Obama’s loss in Pennsylvania or his former pastor’s not-so-comedic stand up performance at the National Press Club. Media analyst Tyndall is talking about the deluge of relentlessly negative media coverage that has plagued Obama in the last month.

Andrew Tyndall, through his Tyndall Report, has been monitoring the nightly newscasts of the three television networks for 20 years. He claims to be the only person on the planet who has personally watched every single weekday network nightly newscast since the summer of 1987.

Here’s what he says about April’s coverage of Obama and Clinton.

As for the candidate coverage, Obama attracted more than HRC and McCain combined (62 mins v HRC 26, McCain 24). For both Obama and Rodham Clinton, most of the month was negative when it came to covering their campaigns. So the accurate way to contrast the two is on their quantity not their quality. The tone of Obama’s coverage was not noticeably more negative than hers; he just received more than twice as much of it.

Tyndall is not suggesting bias. But rather he says something else is at work.

Our explanation rests on the new style of political coverage we have called Reality Gameshow Journalism, a style that sees the Presidential campaign as an elimination contest between larger-than-life personalities, that focuses on the character rather than the ideology of each, that is interested in socio-psychological factors more than issues, that believes that character is most clearly revealed when a candidate is subjected to the ordeal of near elimination.

Under the rubric of Reality Gameshow Journalism, questions about a pastor’s words are transformed from guilt-by-association to insights into judgment and loyalty. Under this rubric, the frontrunner would naturally receive twice the attention of the second place candidate since the closer one comes to victory the more scrutiny one deserves.

And under this rubric, any coverage that helps tighten the race makes a possible elimination primary all the more compelling and dramatic.

What Gameshow Journalism is not, is coverage that examines, illuminates, and weights the worth of the candidates.

And it doesn’t have to be balanced.



So why is no one hammering John McCain for his associating with Pastor John Hagee? (That would be the guy who claimed that the Qur’an contains a “scriptural mandate” to kill Christians and Jews, that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment for “a level of sin that was offensive to God.)

It’s not because the chattering classes are pro McCain or the the network content is controlled by right wing media moguls. Nope. I think Tyndall is right. It’s that slamming John McCain is not part of the ratings-driven game show narrative.

(sigh. “Narrative” used to be such a terrific word beloved by us literary types. Not any more.)

US news director Lara Cohen, a woman who knows tabloid journalism because she works in it daily, puts it this way:

…..The true hallmark of sensationalized journalism is ginning up controversy to drive sales, and for the mainstream news media Wright was a tailor-made tabloid icon. With newspaper sales at record lows, network news ratings tanking and 24-hour news channels desperate to fill up all 24 hours, Wright’s outbursts were the mainstream media’s equivalent of Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch – a train wreck no one could turn away from. And so they milked it, regardless of the impact on the very race they were supposedly covering objectively.

Read that last sentence again. It’s not a pretty one.