Opinion: Hillary Clinton can't control the news
In the eternal struggle between candidates and journalists over who will decide what is news, the candidate usually maintains the upper hand. He or she can make no news by hiding in a bunker and refusing all telephone calls. Or, if she chooses, she can stage an event to spray her campaign fragrance into the public sphere and retreat without answering any questions--as Hillary Clinton did on Tuesday during a "roundtable discussion" in Las Vegas where she essayed her views on immigration.
Clinton took no questions from the press, which New York Times reporter Amy Chozick noted in a Wednesday blog item, and further wrote that Clinton has answered only seven press questions since her April 12 kickoff. This stiff-arming of the press prompted Chozick to debut a new regular Times feature called "Questions for Hillary Clinton" that will pose the questions the Times would have asked Clinton had she taken questions. Chozick's question is a killer:
President Obama said his executive action on immigration went as far as the law will allow. You say you would go beyond what he did. How could you stretch the law further than the president of your own party and his Justice Department says it can go?
In the cockroach vs. rat wrestling match that is the press vs. politicians, you can guess which variety of vermin I root for. But I can transcend my prejudices to referee the contest in an impartial manner as long as I have open on my desktop a pdfof John Zaller's unpublished 1999 book A Theory of Media Politics: How the Interests of Politicians, Journalists, and Citizens Shape the News. (Earlier this year I decanted a jigger of wisdom from Zaller's book; I hereby warn aspiring journalistic claim-jumpers that I have filed a deed to all the riches to be drawn from his book and that they should back off!)
As Zaller sees it, politicians and journalists disagree completely on what constitutes news. Politicians believe that news is what they say or publish in a news release or white paper and that journalists exist only to convey their utterances to the public. Journalists, on the other hand, "do not want to be anybody's handmaiden," Zaller writes, and wish "to make a distinctive journalistic contribution to the news, which they can better accomplish by means of scoops, investigations, and news analyses--all of which politicians detest." Meanwhile, citizens (remember them?) want "to monitor politics and hold politicians accountable with minimal effort."
Politicians stage events like Clinton's roundtable because, as long as the spectacle is compelling and photogenic--and the statement contains any news value (as Clinton's surely did)--journalists must cover them. A controlled event like Clinton's tends to produce only positive news, as long as organizers prevent the press from asking questions, which they did. By bicycling away from the press corps' clinch, Clinton manipulated the news cycle to her advantage. Her timing was sensational, too. As my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti points out, Clinton's roundtable arrived not-so-coincidentally on the official publication date of Peter Schweizer's muckraking bookClinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, giving the Schweizer book competition for coverage.
Chozick's question-posing stunt--and I use that word admiringly--seeks to restore equilibrium to the Clinton vs. the press relationship. Even though the Times covered the Clinton event, the cheeky tweaking in Chozick's blog asserts that the real news is not what Clinton said about immigration. The real news is that she didn't take a genuine immigration question. Journalists forever insist that it's their professional prerogative to decide what's news, Zaller writes, and they resent politicians who would interrupt that prerogative. The politicians resent them back until open warfare breaks out and the scene looks like a reel from a cinéma vérité documentary about the American family. As POLITICO's Hadas Gold writes today, a Clinton spokesman appears to have struck back at Chozick blog with a tweet asking, "If a candidate answers hours of questions from real people on camera but they didn't come from press, did they happen?" And such do we get lost in an endless circle of who gets to decide what's a "real" question from a "real" person?
When the press senses that a candidate is manipulating them--as I imagine Clinton-beat reporters are--it retaliates by going negative, Zaller writes, encoding news stories with negative digs, sometimes folding a piece of positive news between two negative mentions. As the tussle between the press and the pols over vocational dominance continues, hostilities escalate. "Stronger candidates get more coverage, and a larger proportion of that coverage is negative," he writes. "Journalists count on such candidates to provide more-than-adequate amounts of positive information about themselves, and therefore concentrate their own energies on finding negative information about them."
Message to Hillary: Don't take it completely personally--the press may be out to get you but it would be out to get you even if you weren't named Hillary Clinton because you've already wrapped up the nomination. Also, Zaller finds that media negativity can be viewed by as a sign of candidate strength, because only strong candidates have the power to manipulate reporters in a way that earns them a wicked lashing in the press. And finally, he notes, the effect of media negativity on a campaign is "close to zero. To the extent that there is any effect of Media Negativity at all, it is somewhat positive, such that Media Negativity helps rather than hurts."
It's painful for a journalist to read Zaller, but delightfully painful in the way that poking a massive bruise on your thigh is. Through his lens, every press-candidate encounter starts to look like a stylized duel, like something out of Barry Lyndon only updated with smartphones and bright lights. Once reporters become so predisposed, every campaign initiative and event starts to look like a swindle wrapped inside of a hoodwink. Leading candidates like Clinton are always in a better position to dictate the terms of engagement with reporters than the also-rans, so it's only natural that the mutual dislike blossoms there first. By my reckoning, the press and Clinton are only a few weeks away from both sides fixing bayonets and charging.
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National Journal puts the number of Clinton's questions from the press at eight. Got a question for the candidate? Don't send it to my email address: Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts are in a long, Spenglerian struggle for hegemony with my Twitterfeed. My RSS feed was decapitated by the Clintons back in the Arkansas years and is not sentient.
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