Chautauqua, Day 1: John Harwood

John Har­wood was an inter­est­ing choice to have kick off the Chau­tauqua sea­son, and the week one series of dis­cus­sions on ethics and the media. His focus, in a sort of round-about way, was that polit­i­cal party polar­iza­tion both feeds, and is fed by, the drive for view­er­ship of a sensationalism-hungry media.Harwood refers to par­ties as “brands”, and says that in the polit­i­cal sphere, these brands have done noth­ing but solid­ify, cement­ing pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion in a binary sys­tem. This sim­pli­fi­ca­tion is dri­ven by the notion that peo­ple, by-in-large, want to know what they’re get­ting in a par­tic­u­lar can­di­date or party.

His­tor­i­cally, Har­wood con­tends that this cal­ci­fi­ca­tion in the party sys­tems stems from Barry Goldwater’s oppo­si­tion to the Vot­ing Rights act in 1964. The dems became the pro-civil rights party and the repub­li­cans the anti-civil rights party. From then on out, you knew what you were get­ting. If you wanted smaller gov­erne­ment, fewer ser­vices, larger civil defense, and focus on wan­ing dete­ri­o­ra­tion of social val­ues, you were a repub­li­can. If you favored increased fed­eral ser­vices and gun con­trol, eniron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, and abor­tion rights, you’re a demo­c­rat.Does Har­wood have his real hair? Yes, he says, demon­strat­ing his answer to what may be the most impor­tant polit­i­cal ques­tion of the morn­ing.

Decline of the polit­i­cal party sys­tem? Hardly, he says. We’re just on the cusp of a new party sys­tem.

The new one hasn’t ended the par­ties; it’s changed the way peo­ple think and under­stand them, and I think they’ve actu­ally emerged stronger, because peo­ple know what they’re vot­ing for.

Do they really? There’s some data to sup­port it, at least to sup­port the asser­tion that when it counts, the pub­lic steps up to the plate. In 2000, only 105 mil­lion peo­ple voted. In 2004, that num­ber went up to 122 mil­lion, largely attrib­uted to strong sen­ti­ment one way or the other toward the Iraq war.

And yet, in spite of this solid­i­fi­ca­tion in the party sys­tem as Har­wood pro­ports, the Amer­i­can pub­lic is becom­ing less and less easy to pin down on some more tra­di­tion­ally divi­sive social issues. Accord­ing to a recent study by the Pew Foun­da­tion, we the peo­ple skew right on gay mar­riage and gay adop­tion, left on embry­onic stem cell research, and straight down the mid­dle on abor­tion. We’re not mov­ing fur­ther apart, we’re mov­ing closer to cen­ter, accord­ing to the study.

Har­wood is on the com­mu­nity line in this speech. I’m hard-pressed to find a scholar of media that doesn’t sup­port the asser­tion that the search for view­ers and increased cir­cu­la­tion dri­ves des­per­a­tion reportage across news out­lets; a drive to cover sen­sa­tional and sala­cious that trumps — inten­tion­ally or oth­er­wise — report­ing sto­ries to their con­clu­sion. Dare we bring up Duke LaCrosse?

On the other side of the fence, polit­i­cal pun­dits are bet­ter now than ever at tak­ing con­trol of the con­ver­sa­tion, them­selves trump­ing news­gath­er­ing with talk­ing points and spin.

But I’m not con­vinced Har­wood made a clear and com­pelling con­nec­tion that the media is com­plicit in the on-going bifur­ca­tion in the party sys­tem. Instead, I’d sub­mit that media is report­ing less adeptly on social issues, tak­ing the easy — and cheap — out on hard report­ing deci­sions, and the result is the appear­ance of a media role in goos­ing out­rage and sala­cious­ness for fun and profit. That the par­ties are bet­ter at this game than the media doesn’t make it news.A bit off topic, he brought up one of the best points of his speech in the Q&A.

Q: Let’s focus on news­pa­pers for a sec­ond. One ques­tion has to do with what is the con­se­quence of the red­u­ca­tion of news­pa­pers, the reduc­tion of staff, on jour­nal­ism, and is there a rip­ple affect of reduc­ing com­mit­ment in jour­nal­ism in news­pa­pers that will then have a con­se­quence in the over­all deliv­ery in news beyond news­pa­pers?

Har­wood: That’s a very smart ques­tion, and it’s absolutely true for this rea­son. The most impor­tant piece in tele­vi­sion news every­day is what’s in news­pa­pers. One of the inter­est­ing things that I’ve noti­cied going from, you know, peo­ple you keep their foot in both camps: Tele­vi­sion peo­ple don’t have a lot of self con­fi­dence about their own judgement.

This is the paper of record con­nun­drum. I fully con­tend that much of the mar­ket for broad­cast doesn’t con­sider their medium as impor­tant as tra­di­tional print news. This fuels the more sym­bi­otic rela­tion­ship between print and broad­cast: news begins in the papers, is sup­ple­mented the next day in pic­tures, and is inves­ti­gated to con­clu­sion in print. The rise in cable out­lets and their 24-hour cov­er­age has had some affect on the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of this rela­tion­ship, but it’s cer­tainly there. Fewer reporters trained in print news­gath­er­ing will most cer­tainly have a neg­a­tive affect on qual­ity and quan­tity of reportage.

I had the oppor­tu­nity to meet Har­wood after his talk. Turns out, he’s join­ing the online dis­cus­sion and start­ing a blog this week through his role as a polit­i­cal reporter with CNBC. He stopped short of sup­port­ing the asser­tion that the rise of cit­i­zen media fueled by David Gilmor and his ilk was lead­ing to a new middle-media. I told him I thought it was great, his jour­ney into the blo­gos­phere, and wel­comed him. Where could we find him online?

He couldn’t remem­ber the URL.Tomorrow, David Westin, Pres­i­dent of ABC News.