A different take on contemporary political journalism

Different from mine, that is. I typically explain corporate media's failures in terms of their need to stay afloat financially, along with the owners' political agendas. This points out some other plausible factors.

But we also would do well to think about why that might be the case. What’s driving the media’s current failures?

Many critics point the finger at traditional journalistic norms, and with good reason: Some of the problems are baked into the professional values and habits of U.S. journalism. Newsroom ethnographers as far back as the 1970s observed that journalists wrote with two aims in mind: to avoid being accused of political bias and to impress other journalists. Both tendencies persist today. Skittishness about being seen as biased resulted in the both-sidesism that too often characterized coverage of Trump. Meanwhile, coverage of the Build Back Better bill exemplified journalism’s insular tendencies, providing a play-by-play of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s objections rather than explaining the legislation’s actual content and its implications for Americans.

Looking at journalists’ professional values and habits of mind can help explain why the news so often falls short of what democracy needs. But it is not enough. We also need to remember that journalism is a job, and journalists are workers. In their book on creative labor, cultural sociologists David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker argue that “bad work”—that is, work that is boring, insecure, isolating, excessive, or poorly compensated—is more likely to produce poor-quality cultural products. Unsurprisingly, the opposite is true of “good work”—work that is fairly compensated, secure, autonomous, and interesting. If we want to understand why journalists are creating so much news that is of so little civic value, we need to look closely at the conditions under which they labor. - The American Prospect