Ross Douthat has a good post on why this election has devolved into bickering about lipstick and pigs, pregnant teenagers, and tin-foil hat conspiracy theories. He says it’s not entirely the media’s fault.
Yes, the press feeds on conflict and flees from policy substance, but to a large extent that’s because the public
feeds on conflict and flees from policy substance, however much wonks
and watchdogs would like to think otherwise… I have as much contempt for the way the media initially
reacted to Sarah Palin’s nomination as Ezra has contempt for how the
press covered, say, the "lipstick on a pig" controversy or the
"celebrity" ad. But I also know what’s going on in the newspaper
business these days, and I can read those Times "most e-mailed"
lists and see what stories get read and circulated, and as appalled as
I was by the three front-page stories America’s newspaper of record ran
on Bristol Palin the day after the news of her pregnancy broke …
well, I can see why they did it. And if the high-information voters who
read the Times wanted "all Bristol all the time," imagine if
you’re a paper or a TV show trying desperately to reach an audience of
low-information voters
Apt. 11d 
The Times’ mom needs to give her a pat on the shoulder and tell her it’s better to be respected than popular. Not that that worked back in junior high…
I love the NYT, if for no other reason than that it sets up some phenomenal posts for Stuff White People Like.
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Sorry but I just don’t buy this idea that the public is getting what they asked for good and hard. What about the plummeting rates of readership for those same newspapers? What about viewership for traditional news shows? People are *fleeing* this kind of coverage.
A few years ago there was a burst of documentary movie activity; An Inconvenient Truth came out, and the latest Michael Moore movie. At that time I think it was Peter Jennings who was asking, what does this mean for mainstream news? His thesis was that the mainstream news was essentially failing in some way, if audiences were streaming to documentaries to get basic information. I would agree with that perspective. The media is too biased towards conflict and has developed no mechanism for ongoing, contextualized reportage over time. Coverage of the DNC this year, where they spent the whole time trying to drum up the 5 Hillary supporters who were jumping ship, was great evidence of this, IMHO.
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I think people are fleeing not to high minded documentaries, but to bottom feeding blogs and websites that feed their need for fear, conspiracies, and gossip. Actually, I think that the NYT should actually be congratulated on its restraint. It hasn’t published some of the other accounts about the Palin family that I’ve seen on the web. I read interviews of their classmates talking about Track’s drug use and Palin smooching the whole hockey team. I think people would LOVE to know that stuff and it would jack up their readership enormously, but they know that it would hurt their reputation in the process. It hasn’t gone into detail about what an asshole McCain was to his first wife, like the Washington Post did. That would have also been a fun tidbit.
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Josh Marshall, today:
“Of all the shortcomings of the establishment press today, none is more central to the corruption of the profession than the decision to prioritize balance over accuracy. That corruption is visibly on display in the current coverage of the McCain campaign’s policy of deliberate lies. And you won’t find a better example than Cathleen Decker’s piece in yesterday’s LA Times.
“Read into the article and you’ll see numerous instances of McCain’s repeated use of false claims and lies and one instance Decker is able to dig up of an Obama campaign claim that arguably leaves out some information.
“But the conclusion and packaging of the article is that both candidates deceive equally and that they do so because it works. (There was another example, though not quite as egregious, by Jonathan Weismann last week in the Post.)
“We hear a lot about the steep and perhaps terminal decline of the business model underlying daily print newspapers. But this corruption in the basic conception of the craft — which is actually related to the economic decline — gets discussed much less.”
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I think that the loving attention that the press gave Palin along with the front page attention to the stupidity of the pigs/lipstick comment really undermines the whole left wing/media conspiracy. The press will do anything, well almost anything, to get viewers. Partisanship takes a backseat to bucks. Always will.
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My friends at the Florida paper told me everything is measured by “clicks.” How many clicks did the page get? That’s all that counts any more.
So yeah, Palin got clicks, I bet.
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