Full and alarming incoherence

“In most circumstances, presenting information in as intelligible a form as possible is what we are trained for. But the shock I felt hearing half an hour of unfiltered meanderings from the president of the United States made me wonder whether the editing does our readers a disservice.”
As a foreign reporter visiting the US I was stunned by Trump's press conference, by Lenore Taylor, Editor of Guardian Australia. The Guardian, 20 September 2019

Lenore Taylor continues,

I’ve read so many stories about his bluster and boasting and ill-founded attacks, I’ve listened to speeches and hours of analysis, and yet I was still taken back by just how disjointed and meandering the unedited president could sound. Here he was trying to land the message that he had delivered at least something towards one of his biggest campaign promises and sounding like a construction manager with some long-winded and badly improvised sales lines.

I’d understood the dilemma of normalising Trump’s ideas and policies – the racism, misogyny and demonisation of the free press. But watching just one press conference from Otay Mesa helped me understand how the process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.

Verification in reverse

So many of the routines of political journalism were based on behaviorist assumptions about how candidates would behave that simply do not apply. And that’s one of the epistemological crises in journalism right now.[…]

I think we’re completely losing this battle, on every level. And fighting about truth itself — there’s something inherently polarizing about that. We’re just at the beginning of understanding some of his methods for profiting in an environment where truth is exploded.

An example would be his use of verification in reverse. Verification is trying to nail down a claim with facts, evidence, data. Verification in reverse is taking something that has been nailed down and introducing doubt about it. When you do that, it releases a lot of energy, controversy, furor, reaction. And then you can power your political movement with that energy.

The truth-telling system and political journalism rested on certain assumptions about how public actors would behave. Trump shatters all those assumptions.

Jay Rosen, in Is the media making American politics worse?, 22 October 2018.

Entertainment logic

“Journalism academics have always known that newsworthiness, as the American press defines it, isn’t a system with any coherence to it. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a list of factors that occasionally come together to produce news. There’s no real logic to it, other than it’s a list of things that can make something news. The advantage of it is that it leaves maximum leeway for editors to say, ‘This is news,’ and, ‘That’s not news,’ and so it’s news if a journalist decides it’s news.”
Jay Rosen, from Is the media making American politics worse?, in which Rosen is interviewed by Vox's Ezra Klein, 22 October 2018

Rosen continues,

One of the things that slips in there, of course…is that entertainment logic can actually be the logic that a news company is operating under, and it doesn’t have to explain that to its users, or even to itself.

An example I would use is the way that CNN has purchased these pro-Trump talking heads. That doesn’t have any editorial logic to it. It makes sense to have conservative voices. It makes sense to have people from the middle of the country. It makes sense to have people who have certain priorities.

It doesn’t make editorial sense to have a pundit who is defending Trump, right or wrong. But it does make entertainment sense to have people like that on the air, if you are following entertainment logic.

Willful blindness

“So what will they do now? …They have no earthly idea.

“There is simply nothing in the playbook at Meet the Press that tells the producers what to do in this situation. […] They didn’t arrive here through acts of naiveté, but by willful blindness, malpractice among the experts in charge, an insider’s mentality, a listening breakdown, a failure of imagination, and sheer disbelief that the world could have changed so much upon people paid so well to understand it.”
The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd, by Jay Rosen, Press Think, 26 December 2019. Chuck Todd, NBC's Political Director and the anchor of Meet The Press, confessed in a recent Rolling Stone interview that he had been "naive" about the Republican Party's commitment to disinformation.

The game frame

TV news analysts are typically fixated on politics as a game (who are the players? what is the strategy? who is winning/ losing?). The game frame pits parties and groups against one another in an artificially constructed battle that fails to engage with the underlying issue.

The game frame fools the public into feeling like it “totally knows what is going on” when in reality it only knows the soap opera of characters and strategy and none of the historical, economic, environmental, racial, or social context surrounding an actual issue.

Dr. Dana Young, DANNA'S EXPLAINER ON WHY PUNDIT (ANALYST) PANELS ARE BAD FOR DEMOCRACY AND SHOULD DIE (thread), November 2018