Rosen argues that the media owe a duty to the public to provide reporting which they think is in the best interests of citizens. His argument is that if you report elections and politics as if they mattered to people’s daily lives, then that also creates a greater degree of civic capacity, as well as enlivening the public sphere.

There was a bit of irony in two comments he made to Leigh Sales:

JAY ROSEN: Horse race journalism is a reusable model for how to do campaign coverage in which you focus on who’s going to win rather than what the country needs to settle by electing a prime minister.

And it’s easy to do because you can kind of reuse it sort of like a Christmas tree every year and it requires almost no knowledge either.

And it kind of imagines the campaign as a sporting event, right? And everything that happens in the campaign can potentially affect the outcome.

And so you can look at it as ‘How is it going to affect the horse race?’ And every day you can ask, ‘Who is ahead and what is their strategy?’

And I think this perspective appeals to political reporters because it kind of puts them on the inside, looking at the campaign the way the operatives do.

By the way, I’m told that you actually have a program here on Sunday morning called the Insiders.

LEIGH SALES: We do.

JAY ROSEN: Is that true?

LEIGH SALES: We do.

JAY ROSEN: And the “insiders” are the journalists.

LEIGH SALES: That is right.

JAY ROSEN: That’s remarkable.

Sales’ response? “Hmm”.

And then there’s this:

LEIGH SALES: But do you not need both? Because, of course, you do need the stories that give context and explain what’s going on and is this true or not true, how does this all fit? But then how do you ignore – say for example today when we have a former opposition leader showing up at a particular event, you can’t very well just ignore that?

JAY ROSEN: No, you can’t. But what you could do is say ‘Well politics is also theatre, politics is also entertainment’, so in that segment of our coverage, we’ll cover Latham – is that his name?

LEIGH SALES: Latham.

JAY ROSEN: Latham – because clearly this is the entertainment portion of the campaign.

Spot on.

Elsewhere: Public Opinion.

One of those is probably the image of the informed citizen, dutifully reading “all the news that’s fit to print” which underlies so many journalistic ideologies. I had something to say about that recently, along with the related theme that the world will come to an end if people only read stuff that fits particular niches of interest to them. As I was suggesting, that ignores the work of editorial categorisation and selection which has (always) already filtered “news” through a set of presumptions (incidentally, highly gendered ones) about the ideal type of the reader.

We can see a comparable level of forgetting – a key to the distortion inherent in any sort of ideological “thinking” – in the claim that if the newspaper declines, political discourse will decline along with it. Yet it was as long ago as 1962 that the American social scientists Peter Bachratz and Morton S. Baratz pointed to the importance of “non-decisions” in the exercise of power. Now a standard analytical approach in the public policy literature, Bachratz and Baratz observed that many interests and issues are sifted off the table before they even make the agenda.

Something similar operates in the definition of what constitutes “news” and in the sphere of political reporting and commentary, “the legitimate sphere of public debate”. Jay Rosen has a great post on this process at PressThink. It’s well worth keeping in mind next time one of these tired debates that haunt too much of the debate over the media rears its head.

You know why there are bloggers, @Newshour? Because there is “safety first” reasoning in news. People get sick of it and take up their pens.”

Young doesn’t entirely agree – not that the performance of the media in reportage isn’t a jumping off point for the desire to blog – but that the problem with mainstream journalism is “safety first”. He presents three hypotheses which might explain the quality of political reporting and commentary. I think he’s definitely onto something here, though I’d also add that the structure of the media and its corporate logics are also factors we should take note of.

The post concludes:

…perhaps the urge to blog is driven not so much by the tendency of journalists towards “safety first”, but because journalists are by and large socially homogenous and don’t reaffirm the views of most bloggers, who in reaction create their own social networks.

Which is not why I blog at all, but then, I am an statistically inadequate sample, and this post is pure speculation on which I hope to get some feedback from other bloggers.

Part of the academic stuff I’m working on this year goes to the question of the motivation for the creation of “user-generated content”. In the context of political blogging, I’m not at all certain that the sorts of categories the citizen journalism literature employs – ie “monitorial citizen”, “public sphere” and so on – are at all adequate for understanding the desire to blog.

To the degree that they aren’t just dependent on a reinscription of the whole “public purpose” argument about journalism in a new frame and a range of concepts about public deliberation which are too abstract, I think they’re probably a post facto effect rather than a motivator. In fact, I’m not entirely sure there’s as strong a correlation between the quality of the media and the impulse to blog as everyone seems to think. So I’d be very interested in others’ observations!

Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.

At least the turf this issue – the purported opposition to earmarks and pork that Palin is supposed to share with McCain – is being fought over is a public policy issue rather than all the personalised stuff which just puts the Democrats and the media where the GOP want them. But Obama’s reluctance to use the words “lies” and “liars” shows he knows the score. He’s being criticised for that by liberal bloggers, who are cheering on the media “fact checking” exercise.

But all this truthiness is also at great risk of playing into the GOP’s hands – because it reinforces the equation of the media and blogosphere with the Democrats Rosen identified as the tactical positioning the Republicans want – and which George W. Bush reinforced with his claims about “the angry left” in his RNC video link. The culture wars schtick works – because the America of Wal-Marts and small town “values” has more electoral power in the swing states that count than the wonky redoubts of the blue staters. And a lot of those voters – who don’t source their news from the internet but from cable tv – and get their analysis from others of like mind in their own circles rather than bloggers, commentators and wonks – are seeing what McCain wants them to see – a feisty outsider being beaten up by the Beltway elite. Hence McCain’s polling gains, among other demographics, with white women.

Intelligent commentators realise all this. But what no one has seemed to be able to sketch out – in an electoral landscape where the swing states are rustbelt white Reagan Democrat central – is a compelling political and media strategy to rebut and counter it. Crying “truth” and calling time on lies just isn’t enough in a postmodern political world. Anyone remember SwiftBoating? What’s certain is that McCain’s mob have worked out how to game not just the media but also the liberal blogosphere.

Elsewhere: An interesting perspective on all this from sociologist and blogger Andrew Perrin at Scatterplot.