Bipartisan Is Bad ... for Getting Press Coverage
Does the media cover bipartisanship? According to a recent study from George Mason University and Starts With Us reported by The Hill, signs point to no.
The study compared the press coverage of the seven most partisan members of Congress (four Republicans and three Democrats) to the seven most bipartisan members (three Republicans and four Democrats). The report found that "hyper-partisan" politicians got four times the news coverage of their bipartisan colleagues. To put that into a little more perspective, consider this quote: "The most partisan member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, generated nearly ten times as much press coverage in the 2022 election cycle as the least partisan member, Don Bacon, …."
The report adds hard numbers to press coverage, finding that Marjorie Taylor Greene appeared 335 times in major news outlets. In contrast, Bacon, a Republican representative from Nebraska, appeared in 34 stories even though Bacon was in a highly contested election while MTG was waltzing to a victory in the same election cycle.
What does it say about us, America in general, not just the media, that the most polarizing members of Congress are running away with press coverage? Part of the blame has to lay at the feet of those members who are actively trying to get covered by the media. It's hard to blame them for an over-abundance of coverage because also, for better or worse, they understand what their constituents want and are giving it to them. MTG's whole gig revolves around becoming a politician and a political celebrity, so it makes sense that she would seek the limelight.
My question about whether we care about bipartisanship has more to do with those of us who consume the stories that news outlets report. And, to some extent, to how those outlets cover characters like MTG. It is a shame that, after having a reality tv star become president, much of political coverage feels more like Reality Steve than hard news. What is more shameful is how readers have rewarded those outlets by giving views, clicks, and shares to stories of MTG and similar politicians saying outlandish things.
I do not suggest we bury our heads in the sand and ignore what politicians like MTG say. We often cover the craziness on the Right on this blog, after all. There must be some middle ground between ignoring those saying outrageous things and fully embracing the crazy while expressing outrage, whether genuine or as performance art.
And part of that middle ground has to include acknowledging regular politicians doing ordinary things like governing. It's easy to share and talk about whatever wild fabrication MTG has come with for the day, but that gives oxygen to a woman who does not need anymore. Instead, we should spend more time discussing the meat and potatoes of politics. MTG is not looking to govern, but Don Bacon might be. We should cover, read about, share, and talk about these kinds of politicians. It's not that we should ignore MTG, it's good to be aware of what she is saying, but there is a difference between being aware and fanning the flames. And if news outlets saw that stories about MTG got them fewer clicks and page views, they'd be more inclined to give her less space and instead get back to more important news.
While there may not be much we can do in terms of deciding what news gets covered and how, there are a few things we can keep in mind:
1) Before sharing a story or an article, asking why you wish to share the story might be helpful. If there is good information in the story that people need to know, share it away. But if you wish to express outrage, it may be better to do that privately with trusted friends.
2) Be intentional about sharing substantive stories. The TMZ-type reports will get their coverage, but if we wish to get away from the celebrity of politicians like MGT, we must be more conscious of sharing simple stories covering everyday politics.
5 More Things
1) Covering information from the Anti-Defamation League, Axios reports that white supremacist propaganda reached a record high in 2022. The ADL states that the over 6,000 cases they tracked in 2022 was up 38% from the year before and is the highest they have ever recorded.
2) Speaking of white supremacist propaganda, NPR has a story on how far-right groups in Florida are taking advantage of our fractured society to recruit new members. Josh Nunes, a leader of a small far-right group, puts it this way: “'I think our society is pretty fractured. It's like, for the average male in America right now, a lot of dudes don't have one friend,' he says. 'They don't have one person they can call and borrow $500 if they needed to. And that is a thing that's real within this group. If one of our buddies needs help, we're gonna help them. There is a fraternity there.
'We're like regular working-class white people that are racially aware. And so we're Nazis, right?' Nunes says while overseeing the Saturday night laser projections, "And so stuff like this, we feel like it's a good way to relate to normal people.'"
3) Continuing the white supremacist theme, The Rolling Stone covered the attempted takeover of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod by a Pro-Hitler white nationalist named Cory Mahler. Echoing Nunes' comments about taking care of their own, Mahler sees the LCMS church as a place for young men to belong, so long as they are far-right and believe in “God's vision” for a white ethnostate in America.
4) ChatGPT and AI's 15 minutes of fame is getting longer. The Atlantic issues a warning that not only could bad actors use AI to spread misinformation at a massive scale, Andrew Torba, CEO of the far-right social network Gab, is already trying. AI has a lot of promise, but that promise may not be for good. Gary Marcus writes, "Each day is bringing us a little bit closer to a kind of information-sphere disaster, in which bad actors weaponize large language models, distributing their ill-gotten gains through armies of ever more sophisticated bots." In the immortal words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, "Your scientists were so concerned with if they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should."
5) More and more stories keep coming from Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News and its coverage of the 2020 election. But the Daily Beast may have found the strangest story yet. A woman, Marlene Bourne, who believed both that she may be a ghost and that Justice Scalia was murdered while being hunted for sport, sent an email to Sidney Powell, a Trump campaign lawyer. And the contents of that email ended up being run on air at Fox, even though Bourne has no credentials in this life or after. The story is almost too wild to comprehend.