We need more moral journalism. HORSE-RACE JOURNALISM 515 strides at the quarter pole, lose momentum and slow down on the back stretch, or win by a nose because of a media blitz in the home stretch. ), This weekend alone, other specters of 2016 loomed large in coverage, too. Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer. The best example was in the first televised debates. It also drew interest from the Poynter Institute and from Jay Rosen, a media critic and associate professor at New York University and apostle of what became known as “public journalism.” (2017), “Reliability in the Race Horse Market – The Fair Value of Intangible Ahead of 2020, he wrote, “learning trivial lessons will not do”. The NYU professor Jay Rosen, in a recent talk on how political coverage is “broken,” included horse race coverage in his list of media sins. In 2008, a financial crisis that in its own way is as dire as 9/11 is being covered in ways that are divisive and infuriating. 1 For a definition of metaphor see Bollettieri-Bosinelli, 1988 (Introduction) and Malmkjaer, K. But there's a scandal in The Discourse because we need a storyline . This ratio seems defensible, seeing as the who’s up/who’s down of the horse race can change daily. (The poll, conducted by local pollster Ann Selzer, has traditionally been a useful guide to the result; ahead of its planned release, David Weigel, of the Washington Post, called it “an event of nearly religious importance”.) Carlos Maza (@gaywonk), who covers the media for Vox, put forth a particularly sophisticated and approachable analysis of tactical framing in a video in … “The press’s attention to early winners, and its tendency to afford them more positive coverage than their competitors, is not designed to boost their chances, but that’s a predictable effect,” he writes. Ignore the critics! Horse race journalism has a bad reputation among press critics. The Financial Crisis and Horse Race Journalism In 2001, the events of 9/11 were covered by the news media in a way that reassured and unified an angry and fearful country. Horseracism might be scary if the campaign press corps produced nothing but who’s up/who’s down stories. On Saturday, the handicappers in the political press waited for an update on the running: the final Des Moines Register poll of the cycle. Maybe there should be less focus on the horse-race aspect of politics and more on the issues facing the country. This kind of issues journalism is important, and there should be more of it. This article was first published in the CJR, ‘Even before Iowa, there’s been ample indication that the framing errors that shaped coverage in 2016 are being repeated.’, s campaigning in Iowa enters the home stretch, the Democratic candidates for president are finally at the starting gate, and mixed horserace metaphors are everywhere. Regular handicapping—especially in the days of FiveThirtyEight, when polling analysis has become more robust—provides another campaign service. Most politicians like radio and television because these media: allow politicians to reach a broad audience without the adversarial questions of print reporters. Issue stories don’t need that sort of constant revisiting, especially if they’re done well. n. Media coverage that focuses on poll results and political battles instead of policy issues. Horse-race coverage trivializes politics into a game or a sporting event, the critics say. A. frequent investigative reporting devoted to policy issues B. obsession with election-related polling results This high-paced, twist and turn style of election coverage fits seamlessly with today’s entertainment culture. There was no policy discussion in that at all. (As the Times wrote on Saturday: “A 2020 primary season that was initially seen as a contest of ideas, with liberal activists largely setting the agenda” has “given way” to the electability question.) That resonated with editors here at The Charlotte Observer. We even literally had a fresh round of Hillary v Bernie coverage, fueled by recent sniping from Clinton, and by Rashida Tlaib, a Sanders surrogate, booing Clinton at a rally. My email alerts are likable, my Twitter feed is electable and my RSS feed is despicable. The host, George Stephanopoulos, instantly pivoted to socialism’s bad rep.). Telling voters who’s winning and who’s losing the 2020 campaign isn’t trivial—it’s a crucially important job for the media. And we should ensure the other stuff we cover adds value, too. The worst examples of horse-race journalism leave the American unprepared to properly understand and respond to the challenges being presented to them both by the Age of Trump and the … We are in the middle of one of the most serious pandemic this planet has ever faced, and yet it was Mike Pence’s fly that was being discussed on the television and the newspapers. Also, how many days do you think Dan Balz would last on the Washington Nationals beat? So let my commandment go forth and embolden the campaign press corps! (As the data guru Nate Silver noted, planning to obsess over a single poll for so long is silly, for reasons that go far beyond unexpected technical problems.) The Register wrote in a note that “while this appears to be isolated to one surveyor, that could not be confirmed with certainty”; CNN, which was also involved with the poll, said it was scrapped “out of an abundance of caution”. It means reporting on politics with the help of sports metaphors. A weekly programme that examines and dissects the world’s media, how they operate and the stories they cover. At the very least horse race journalism engages … Treat campaigns less as a horse race, he said, and more as a job application for governing. If there’s little difference between the views of the candidate you favor and the leader’s, horse-race coverage helps optimize your vote by steering you toward the politician most likely to implement your views. An important example was the decision of the Charlotte Observer to dispense with horse race campaign coverage, that is, stories about how the campaigns were trying to win the election. US election: horse-race reporting is media gold but democratic poison October 6, 2020 7.58am EDT Richard Thomas , Allaina Kilby , Matt Wall , Swansea University Horse Racing”, 26ème onférence de l’AIMS, Lyon (France) 5. By giving voters a window on the closed world of insider politics, horse-race stories help focus reader attention on the races. Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. (As a rule, the greatest opponents of horse-race coverage are the ones trailing in the polls.). Like it or not, political campaigns are contests in which the prize goes to the victor and the loser goes home. Primary contests almost demand horse-race coverage, as Greg Marx suggested in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2011. It nudges substantive policy coverage out of the public eye and encourages voters to board the leader’s bandwagon. It’s hardly like coverage of the race, to this point, has struck an appropriate balance between substance and handicapping. It’s not just press critics dumping on hate horseracism, to borrow Brian Montopoli‘s piquant term. The race is exciting to follow from beginning to end. Some coverage of policy has been good, but more often, it’s been broad-strokes stuff, and preoccupied with positioning. We heard about candidates’ “jockeying” – “for an edge” and “over notions about electability” – and that “the horse race has overtaken policy as a focus right now”. President Trump and Joe Biden participate in the … It means reporting on politics with the help of sports metaphors. Opinion: Horse-race political analysis is important — and flawed. "For journalists, the horse-race metaphor provides a framework for analysis. ; 1 The use of metaphor1 in economics writing has received a good deal of attention in the past for example, by recent writers such as Henderson (1982) McCloskey (1985, 1990), Klamer (1988) and Mason 1991). Lis Smith, who speaks for Buttigieg’s campaign, praised both outlets for their integrity, as did prominent journalists like Art Cullen, editor of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times. Horse-race coverage also helps clarify the voters’ minds when candidates converge on the issues, as happens regularly in the Democratic presidential derbies. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns. Horse race journalism isn’t going anywhere any time soon. His polls are high, he's broadly popular. By asking it you … But that’s never been the case. In fact, such signaling makes democracy possible. to address mistakes he’s been accused of making in (and since) 2016, reflected, for CJR, on the inadequacy of our collective self-criticism, spoke with journalists and media-watchers. The use of illegal drugs and product on the race horses’ pre race can significantly alter the horses performance whether for the good or the bad and in the long run, harm the horse terribly. A story on the boost in the polls that a candidate received after a recent debate Maybe we should rebalance political coverage away from who is up and who is down in favor of candidates’ policy proposals on pandemic response, or police reform, or containing Chinese aggression. Smith’s and Hayes’s respective audiences have different tastes, but Hayes added an important, universal caveat: the horserace, he said, is “a thing to cover, it’s just that that is not all you cover.” In Iowa and beyond, we should remember that. The candidate’s image, personality, staff relations, and strategy are the main foci of reporting. The presidential campaign has another 22 months to run, leaving plenty of time and space to explore the contest from multiple perspectives. Still, the cancellation left a hole in CNN’s schedule; it had planned to give the poll an hour of airtime. 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. On Friday, Dean Baquet, executive editor of the Times, went on The Daily, the paper’s flagship podcast, to address mistakes he’s been accused of making in (and since) 2016, including “bothsidesism”, the Times’s handling of stolen information, and, prominently, horserace errors; Michael Barbaro, the host, asked Baquet to evaluate specific examples of coverage from the last cycle. How did the Washington Post persuade Chelsea Janes to take that demotion? Meet the presenter. As ever, the problem, over the weekend, was one of proportionality. tend to focus on the tw o-par ty case of US presidential elections ~ but see When it comes to campaign coverage, the press is not a passive actor. (Yesterday, on ABC’s This Week, one of them called Sanders unelectable because he’s “a grumpy, angry person”. Horse-race journalism dominated primary coverage, argues new Harvard study. Last month, CJR and the Guardian spoke with journalists and media-watchers about these errors and others, and how we might avoid them. He writes the Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter The Media Today. It depicts an election as a horse race, where the focus is not on the candidate’s policy but rather on how the candidates oppose each other. Over the weekend, it felt as if today’s caucuses in the state – which typically are an all-consuming story on their eve – were themselves in a race for media attention, nosing out in front of Trump’s impeachment, the coronavirus, the Super Bowl, and other big stories. When journalists speculate about ‘electability’ we risk getting it wrong. About the show. Feed the horses! He points out that a candidate who’s performing well usually is portrayed positively while one who isn’t … Meanwhile, policy wonk Bruce Bartlett knocked the Washington Post for assigning baseball reporter Chelsea Janes to the 2020 campaign, saying the personnel move proved that “the horse race is all that matters to the major media.”, Horse-race coverage trivializes politics into a game or a sporting event, the critics say. We heard about candidates’, “the horse race has overtaken policy as a focus right now”, traditionally been a useful guide to the result, CNN, which was also involved with the poll, said it, as did prominent journalists like Art Cullen, we have a habit of warping their ideas of who can win and who can’t. This is a good example of horse race journalism eating journalists' brains again, like it has in years past. And the primary is not over: there’s still an awfully long way to go until a winner is crowned. horse-race journalism. Why Horse-Race Political Journalism Is Awesome, Stop Freaking Out About Trump’s State of Emergency Threats, Trump’s Best Shutdown Move Is to Fold Now, California's road to recovery runs through D.C. Republicans, Why New Jersey’s ventilator guidelines may favor younger, whiter patients, Rhode Island ends specific restrictions on New Yorkers — by making them national. Speaking Sunday on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Associated Press Executive Editor Sally Buzbee urged the media “to spend less time, or perhaps no time at all, on horse-race polls that project forward to the 2020 presidential election.” Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan concurred and quoted approvingly from horse-race antagonist Jay Rosen, who would have campaign journalists ditch who’s up/who’s down for more reporting out the “citizens agenda.” Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin, too, just slammed horse-race journalism in a Columbia Journalism Review piece about campaign cliches. As the 2020 presidential ponies break from the gate and the political press charts their positions—leading the pack, on the rail, running in the mud—critics of horse-race coverage are sounding their usual condemnations of the genre. (As I’ve written before, Trump’s insults are powerful rhetorical darts but the press tends to handle them carelessly.) The preponderance of such framing is a favorite punching bag for many media critics, who see it, variously, as trivial, unfair and unreliable. Horse race journalism is particularly prevalent in election campaign coverage, mainly in the context of opinion polls (→ Election Campaign Communication; Political Communication). For journalists, the horse-race metaphor provides a framework for analysis. Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because “who’s gonna win?” is not an ideological question. Thus, this dominant approach to covering elections has come to be referred to by academics and others as horse race journalism, the game schema, or the strategy frame. Which of the following is an example of horse-race journalism? Patterson explains how horse race journalism affects candidates’ images and can influence voter decisions. Genuinely divergent ideas aren’t dangerous; they’re what elections should be about. Horse race journalism is political journalism of elections that resembles coverage of horse races because of the focus on polling data, public perception instead of candidate policy, and almost exclusive reporting on candidate differences rather than similarities. On this view, poll stories should be entirely consumed with the “game” or “race” metaphor of electoral journalism and utterly bereft of the political substance of the campaign (see also Iyengar et al., Reference Iyengar, Norpoth and Hahn 2004). Especially in the opening days of a candidacy, a politician must alert potential supporters of his existing supporters. Looking through the holes left by the poll, our obsession with the horserace was clear to see. Watchdog journalism is when the media uncovers important information about politicians or politics that they potentially don't want uncovered. At the end of the 2008 campaign, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell sorted Post political coverage over the previous year and found 1,295 horse-race stories compared with 594 stories about the issues. Instead, the Observer convened representative citizens to choose issues for reporters to investigate and to draft questions that the candidates were asked to answer on the pages of the … Horse racing also has a large issue with cheating that can harm both the jockey and the horse against their will. Its defenders counter that knowing who’s up and who’s down is what elections are all about, and that this year, in particular, Democratic voters and candidates alike have been heavily preoccupied with the need to beat Donald Trump. Send your answers to [email protected]. Try telling Sunday show pundits that. Worse, we risk warping the debate and biasing voters, Last modified on Tue 15 Dec 2020 14.34 GMT. But the discussion dealt more with the Times’s misreading of the field – Clinton was inevitable; Trump was impossible – than with the deeper problems of the horserace model. One of the great attractions to horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to play up their detachment. Politicians from Jimmy Carter to Bob Dole have claimed that the “who’s winning” stories contribute to voter apathy. Horse race journalism is particularly prevalent in election campaign coverage, mainly in the context of opinion polls. Levine provides an example of an alternative approach: in the early 1900s, the Charlotte Observer dispensed with “horse race campaign coverage, that is, stories about how the campaigns were trying to win the election. (Last year, Todd Gitlin reflected, for CJR, on the inadequacy of our collective self-criticism. Sunday shows on other networks appeared to have been blindsided, too. Horse race journalism is a controversial form of political coverage. ses of horserace journalism ~ Patterson, 1993; Rosenstiel, 2005!, which 268 M ATTHE WS ET AL . The Republican Horse Race Is Over, and Journalism Lost Buttons and masks for sale before a campaign rally for the Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump at … Even before Iowa, there’s been ample indication that the framing errors that shaped coverage in 2016 are being repeated, despite insistence, in many media circles, that we should avoid them. Bernie is winning and in position to lock up the nomination. Some of the Sunday shows took all this as fresh evidence that the Democrats are tearing themselves apart, which felt a bit contrived given that Clinton isn’t running, and that those who are have mostly behaved cordially until now (with some notable exceptions). Instead, the Observer convened representative citizens to choose issues for reporters to investigate and to draw questions that the candidates were asked to answer on the pages of the newspaper. Over the weekend, it felt as if today’s caucuses in the state – which typically are an all-consuming story on their eve – were themselves in a race for media attention, nosing out in front of Trump’s impeachment, the coronavirus, the Super Bowl, and other big stories. People want to be entertained constantly and thus the excitement of horse race journalism engages them in a way that lengthy pieces on policy stands no longer can. Watch The Listening Post every Saturday at 0830GMT. American newspapers overflow with detailed stories about the issues and the candidates’ positions. Horse race journalism is a controversial form of political coverage. Horse race journalism is no different. In his Super Bowl “interview” (sic) with Sean Hannity, Trump sprayed insults about his Democratic rivals (“sleepy” Joe Biden; “short” Michael Bloomberg) that mainstream outlets eagerly amplified. Those we canvassed disagreed as to the ills of horserace coverage, specifically: Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed (who is headed to the Times) said it was “dead”; Chris Hayes, of MSNBC, called it “fine”. The phenomenon of horse-race journalism can clearly be spotted in the media's _____. Media uses this framework to show that “the race—not the winner—is the story. Pundits aren’t the only ones who worry about a candidate’s electability. I agree that the political press emphasizes horse-race coverage too much, that Obama's reelection prospects look better than one might expect given … A horse is judged not by its own absolute speed or skill, but rather by its comparison to the speed of other horses, and especially by its wins and losses." This weekend, of all weekends, wasn’t all the horserace talk justified? Not many voters will join a bandwagon that doesn’t have followers or wheels. That’s exactly what is happening with horserace journalism. Horse-race journalism is also sometimes referred to as “game schema,” the “strategy frame,” or “tactical framing”. Blow-by-blow coverage that gives disproportionate attention to one or … Without the work of election handicappers, coverage would come to resemble an endless series of policy white papers that nobody reads. As campaigning in Iowa enters the home stretch, the Democratic candidates for president are finally at the starting gate, and mixed horserace metaphors are everywhere. Then, a shock stumble: the poll was pulled at the last minute, after a respondent informed Pete Buttigieg’s campaign that Buttigieg had not been offered to them as an option. And that was just in the New York Times. Botton C. (2017), “Reliability in Active Markets of Singular Biological Assets – The Fair Value of Race Horses”, 13th Workshop on European Financial Reporting EUFIN, Florence (Italie) 6. otton . Reporters love horse-race stories, the thinking goes, because they can easily turn polling data into quick copy. Search this website, and you’ll find any number of columns decrying the campaign press corps’s horse race mentality.I’ve written them myself. Spoke with journalists and media-watchers about these errors and others, and there should be more of it be... 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