By Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan | The Washington Post
A new Pew report on the state of the media exposes one of the worst-kept secrets in politics: reporters are losing their power to frame presidential contests for the average citizen.
“Campaign reporters were acting primarily as megaphones, rather than investigators, of the assertions put forward by the candidates and other political partisans,” according to the report. “Only about a quarter of statements in the media about the character and records of the presidential candidates originated with journalists in the 2012 race, while twice that many came from political partisans.”
Here’s a look at how those 2012 numbers compared to past presidential elections:
That’s a remarkable reversal in how people are getting their information about the presidential candidates and reflects two realities.
1. Technology has enabled candidates/campaigns to more effectively end-run the mainstream media. President Obama’s campaign team has used everything from his Twitter feed to the images that official White House photographer Pete Souza sends out via Flickr to sell their preferred image of the nation’s chief executive to the country. That is an image not filtered through the media in any way, shape or form.
2. There are simply fewer reporters than there were a decade or two decades ago due to the contraction of the news business — particularly when it comes to newspapers and magazines. “Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30 percent since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978,” according to the Pew report. With fewer reporters and more to cover — thanks to the endless churn of social media, cable television and so on and so forth — the tendency to do a sort of paint-by-numbers reporting takes over.
