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Vote Smart provides free, unbiased, in-depth information about current officials, candidates, issues, legislation, and voting. Non-partisan and nonprofit since 1988.

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It's no secret that the period of time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq represents one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media. Every branch of the media failed, from daily newspapers, magazines and Web sites to television networks, cable channels and radio. I'm not going to go into chapter and verse about the media's specific failures, its credulousness about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds and failure to make clear that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 -- they're too well known to repeat. In any case, the real failing was not in any one area; it was across the board. Bush administration lies and distortions went unchallenged, or were actively promoted. Fundamental and problematic assumptions about terrorism and the "war on terror" were rarely debated or even discussed. Vital historical context was almost never provided. And it wasn't just a failure of analysis. With some honorable exceptions, good old-fashioned reporting was also absent.
But perhaps the press's most notable failure was its inability to determine just why this disastrous war was ever launched. Kristina Borjesson, author of "Feet to the Fire," a collection of interviews with 21 journalists about why the press collapsed, summed this up succinctly. "The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation's top messengers about why we went to war," Borjesson told AlterNet. "[War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren't clear about it, that means the public wasn't necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don't think the American people are clear about it."
Of course, the media was not alone in its collapse. Congress rolled over and gave Bush authorization to go to war. And the majority of the American people, traumatized by 9/11, followed their delusional president down the primrose path. Had the media done its job, Bush's war of choice might still have taken place. But we'll never know.
Why did the media fail so disastrously in its response to the biggest issue of a generation? To answer this, we need to look at three broad, interrelated areas, which I have called psychological, institutional and ideological. The media had serious preexisting weaknesses on all three fronts, and when a devastating terrorist attack and a radical, reckless and duplicitous administration came together, the result was a perfect storm.
The psychological category is the most amorphous of the three and the most inexactly named -- it could just as easily be termed sociological. By it, I mean the subtle, internalized, often unconscious way that the media conforms and defers to certain sacrosanct values and ideals. Journalists like to think of themselves as autonomous agents who pursue truth without fear or favor. In fact, the media, especially the mass media, adheres to a whole set of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit codes that govern what it feels it can say. Network television provides the clearest example. From decency codes to subject matter, the networks have always been surrounded by a vast, mostly invisible web of constraints.
Seen in this light, the mass media is a quasi-official institution, an info-nanny, that is held responsible for maintaining a kind of national consensus. Just as our legal system is largely based on what a "reasonable" person would think, so our mass media is charged with presenting not just an accurate view of the world but also an "appropriate" one.
What "appropriate" means in absolute terms is impossible to define. In practice, however, its meaning is quite clear. It's reflected in a cautious, centrist media that defers to accepted national dogmas and allows itself to shade cautiously into advocacy on issues only when it thinks it has the popular imprimatur to do so. The "culture wars" of recent decades are largely a backlash by enraged conservatives who correctly perceive that the "liberal" media has conferred its quasi-official seal of approval on issues like gay rights and women's right to abortion. In fact, the mainstream media only dares to deviate from the imagined national center, from "appropriate" discourse, within a highly circumscribed area.
Parents may be justified in basing their decisions on what is "appropriate." But for media organizations to do it is extremely dangerous -- and even more so in times of war or national trauma. After 9/11, the area of allowed deviation shrank even more. What was "appropriate" became deference to the nation's leaders. Patriotism and national unity trumped truth.
The outburst of media patriotism after the attacks reveals how fragile the barrier is between journalism and propaganda. Fox News, whose newscasters sported American flag pins and where the "news" consisted of cheerleading for Bush administration policies, was, of course, the most egregious case. One month after the United States began bombing Kabul, Fox anchor Brit Hume actually said, "Over at ABC News, where the wearing of American flag lapel pins is banned, Peter Jennings and his team have devoted far more time to the coverage of civilian casualties in Afghanistan than either of their broadcast network competitors." Reading this statement five years later is a salutary reminder of how pervasive such jingoist, near-Stalinist groupthink was in those days -- and still is on Fox.
Fox was the worst, but the rest of the mainstream media was clearly influenced by the perceived need to be "Americans first and journalists second." This was manifested less in obviously biased or flawed stories than in subtler ways: the simple failure to investigate Bush administration claims, go outside the magic circle of approved wise men, or in general aggressively question the whole surreal adventure. This failure was even more glaring because the run-up to war took place in slow motion. For nine months or more, everyone knew Bush was determined to attack Iraq, and no one really knew why. Yet the mainstream media was unable to break out of its stupor. At a critical moment, that stupor appeared almost literal.
In an infamous Bush press conference on March 6, 2003, just days before the Iraq war began, the assembled media bigwigs were so lethargic and apparently resigned to the inevitability of war that they seemed to be drugged. ABC News White House correspondent Terry Moran said that the press corps left "looking like zombies."
I'm not saying that there's no place for patriotism, or fellow feeling, in journalism. 9/11 was a special case. Thousands of Americans had just been killed, and a heightened emotional awareness of our shared national identity was both inevitable and unexceptionable. Who, for example, would quarrel with the "Portraits of Grief" series the New York Times ran, honoring each of the victims of 9/11? Running this series had clear political ramifications. The Times, for instance, has never run a series about the 3,000 or more victims of automobile accidents killed every month in the United States. But it was a legitimate news decision.
But when it comes to forward-looking analysis and reporting -- as opposed to elegiac coverage -- patriotism and groupthink are journalistic poison. Hume's implicit argument that it was "un-American" to report extensively on civilian casualties was an extreme example. But in newsrooms across the land, thousands of smaller, unnoticed cases of self-censorship or selective reporting were taking place. 9/11 in particular was a sacred taboo that even the most cold-blooded, dispassionate journalists feared to disturb. They'd seen what happened to Susan Sontag, who was crucified for daring to say that the 9/11 attackers were not cowards, that President Bush's tough-talking response was "robotic," and that America urgently needed to rethink its Middle East policies. (The New Republic ran an article that began, "What do Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Susan Sontag have in common?") Bill Maher lost his network TV show after he refused to kowtow to the "terrorists are cowards" line, and Noam Chomsky was virtually declared a traitor for calling America a terrorist state and warning that a violent response to 9/11 would backfire.
A personal example: In a Salon piece I wrote before the 2004 elections, when the worst of the patriotic fervor had long subsided, I wrote, "Heretical as it is to say, the terror attacks proved that it is possible to overreact -- more specifically, to react foolishly -- to an attack that left 3,000 dead." The idea that we had "overreacted" to this sacred event was so explosive, even then, that my editor flagged the line and questioned me about it. In the end the line stayed, but I write for Salon -- one of the few major media outlets that were consistently against the war from the beginning, one that has no corporate owner and is aggressively independent. How many such sentiments ended up on cutting-room floors across the country -- or were never even typed? As Mark Hertsgaard noted in his important study of the media's weakness during the Reagan years, "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency," the most effective censorship is self-censorship.
In short, the attacks not only killed almost 3,000 Americans, but also killed the mainstream media's ability to challenge the administration -- one that was expert at framing all dissent as bordering on treason. When Ari Fleischer infamously said that "all Americans ... need to watch what they say, watch what they do," the mainstream media obeyed. This timorousness was brought into stark relief by the far more trenchant and critical perspectives offered by analysts, often academics, who didn't write for a mass audience, and who therefore had not learned, as so many mainstream journalists have, to defer to the best and brightest and make their opinions conform to an imagined American center.
Time and again, in the run-up to war and during its early phase, I was amazed at the difference between the clear-eyed analysis to be found in books, and the mushy centrist pap that dominated the papers and TV. It was a kind of surreal battle of books vs. the mass media -- and books won hands down.
Rashid Khalidi's "Resurrecting Empire," written before and during the early days of the Iraq war, accurately predicted the quagmire that America was about to step into, hammering home the notion that for people in the Middle East, who have a long historical memory of imperialist oppression, our "noble" mission would not be seen as such. Michael Mann's "Incoherent Empire," also written just before and in the early days of the Iraq war, exposed the incoherence of Bush's "war on terror." Mann pointed out that there is a fundamental difference between "national" terrorists like Hamas and "international" ones like al-Qaida, and that treating them as if they were the same, as Bush moralistically did and still does, was a catastrophic blunder. And Malise Ruthven's "A Fury for God," which came out before the Iraq war, traced the historical and intellectual roots of violent Islamism through the Muslim Brotherhood to Sayyid Qutb, noted the corrosive effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Muslim minds, and cautioned that "another Gulf War will do far more harm than good."
Not all was lost. Some of the best breaking commentary was on the Internet, on blogs like Juan Cole's "Informed Comment" and Helena Cobban's "Just World News," but these sites had a limited readership. There were some notable exceptions on the print side, like the superb reporting of Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, who aggressively reported out the Bush administration's bogus claims about the "threat" posed by Saddam Hussein. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus also questioned Bush administration claims about WMD (his big pre-war story on this subject, after almost being killed, was relegated to page A-17). And the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh and Mark Danner, writing for the New York Review of Books, also distinguished themselves with excellent coverage of Abu Ghraib, following the thread that led directly from the blood-spattered rooms outside Baghdad to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But such authors and journalists were few and far between, and they were almost never seen on TV. Long into the Iraq war, much of the mainstream media continued to fixate on Saddam Hussein's missing WMD and bloviate about the challenges of "reshaping the Middle East," ignoring these deeper arguments. It was a stark illustration of the difference between journalism and scholarship.
Even before Iraq and the Bush presidency revealed its feet of clay, American journalism was not in one of its heroic phases. The press is less aggressive than it was in the Watergate era. Its adversarial role has been weakened. It defers more to authority. It is tamer, more docile, less threatening to what the great Israeli journalist Amira Hass called"the centers of power."
There are a number of reasons for this softening of journalism's backbone. One is economic. The decline of newspapers, the rise of infotainment, and media company owners' insistence on delivering high returns to their shareholders have diminished resources and led to a bottom-line fixation unconducive to aggressive reporting. There are big bucks to be made in being aggressively adversarial, but most of those bucks are on the right, not the left. The meteoric success of right-wing media outlets like Fox News and ranting demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter has not encouraged media owners, too shortsighted to see that there are viable alternatives to the kind of bland national nanny-ism manifest on the networks, to pursue real journalism. (The blogosphere represents the beginning of a national revolt against the now-discredited media gatekeepers.)
Another is the opiating effect of corporate culture: Major media has become increasingly bland and toothless, just like the huge bureaucracies that own it and that are increasingly indistinguishable from each other and from the federal government. It is harder to "monitor the centers of power" when you work for a gigantic corporation that is itself at the bull's-eye of power.
Then there is the Faustian trade-off of "access" journalism, to which, as the Judith Miller debacle revealed, more and more prominent journalists have succumbed. As Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg told Editor and Publisher in 2003, this is a cardinal journalistic sin. "It is irresponsible for anyone in the press to take your understanding exclusively from government accounts, from the president or secretary of defense or lower-level officials," Ellsberg said. "That definitely includes backgrounders that purport to be the 'real' inside story. Just as press conferences are a vehicle for lying to the public, backgrounders are a vehicle for lying to the press, convincing the press they are getting the inside story when all they are getting is a story that is sellable to the press."
As the war drums beat, the Beltway press bought and bought and bought -- before they discovered they'd been sold.
A closely related issue is the rise of a super-class of journalists, mostly TV talking heads, who are as wealthy and famous as the people they cover -- and who routinely hobnob with them at parties and social events. These celebrity journalists may make a show of their "toughness," but they swim happily in the conventional wisdom that flows all around them. And as it relates to the Middle East, that conventional wisdom is bankrupt.
Which leads us to the third and final area where journalism failed in the aftermath of 9/11: ideology. Evaluating why America was attacked required journalists to learn about the history of the Arab/Muslim world -- and not just skim one of Bernard Lewis' tendentious articles discounting Arab grievances. Evaluating how dangerous Saddam Hussein really was required knowledge of the contemporary Middle East -- not just a quick read of Kenneth Pollack's"The Threatening Storm," which argued that Saddam posed so great a threat to America that war was necessary. Assessing Bush's entire "war on terror" required a dispassionate exploration of terrorism itself -- an understanding that terrorism is essentially a form of asymmetrical warfare, that it often succeeds by provoking an overreaction, that it can be waged in the service of legitimate goals, and that most terrorists are not cowards or madmen -- free of 9/11 emotionalism. Indeed, every one of these issues needed to be looked at completely objectively, without sacred cows of any kind.
None of this happened for three closely related reasons. The first was simple ignorance: Most mainstream journalists simply didn't know very much about the Middle East, and in thrall to a kind of bad humility, deemed it above their pay grade to find out.
Second, American society in general has a strongly pro-Israel orientation -- one that journalists generally share (or are too intimidated or ignorant to contest) -- which inevitably guides their assumptions and beliefs about Arabs, terrorism and the Middle East in general. The historian Tony Judt argued in the London Review of Books that the support so many liberal journalists and pundits gave to Bush's war is best explained by their backing for Israel. This orientation, because it is deemed "appropriate," affects virtually every aspect of the media's coverage of the Middle East. Arab and Muslim perspectives, because they tend to be anti-Israeli, are rarely heard in the American media; if they had been, many Americans might have had quite a different assessment of the Iraq war's chances of success. Instead, the U.S. media works within a tiny ideological spectrum on the Middle East, using the same center-right and right-wing sources again and again. To take just one specific example, the New York Times, when it needs comment on Israeli affairs, often relies on experts from the Washington Institute on Near East Affairs (WINEP), a center-right, pro-Israel think tank. The Times rarely asks center-left or left-wing Middle East experts like Cobban or M.J. Rosenberg to comment on Israel. There is no evidence that the Iraq debacle, which these right-wing pundits almost universally supported, has led the media to rethink its sources or its ideological orientation.
Still worse, perhaps, the taboo against discussing this subject in public helped stifle vitally needed debate about the war. As Michael Kinsley pointed out more than four years ago in Slate, the fact that a large motivation for the war was influential neoconservatives' support for Israel was "the proverbial elephant in the room: Everybody sees it, no one mentions it." Kinsley correctly points out that there were honorable motivations behind this silence: no one wanted to put in play the crude anti-Semitic smear that this war was drummed up by Jews whose primary allegiance was to Israel. This is a caricature. As Kinsley and I have both argued, for the neoconservative Jews who played a key role in brainstorming the war, it was simply taken as axiomatic that America's interests and Israel's are identical. But that assumption of shared interests is itself highly problematic, to say the least. Some commentators, like Philip Weiss, have begun to raise the sensitive issue of the role played by the neocons' concern for Israel's security. In years to come, historians will ponder why America under Bush adopted, in effect, the Israeli position toward the Arab world without the ramifications of this radical and extremely risky move ever being discussed, or indeed the parallels even being acknowledged.
Finally, the media was unable to deal with the abstract and highly ideological motivations for Bush's war -- especially because those motivations, as Paul Wolfowitz notoriously admitted, were never really made clear. To oppose the war, one had to challenge the two real reasons behind it -- the neoconservative crusade against "Islamofascism" and the cold warriors' desire to assert American power -- head on. But this meant not only taking on the sacred cows of 9/11 and Israel, but also dealing with the refusal of the administration to publicly acknowledge these abstract reasons, and challenging a White House that "for bureaucratic reasons," in Wolfowitz's words, was hiding behind its trumped-up "evidence" about Saddam's WMD. For the mainstream media -- unprepared, intimidated, caught up in the torrent of Beltway wisdom and flag-waving -- this was far too much to deal with. As Kristina Borjesson noted, the result was that the media signed off on a war that it itself did not understand. There could be no more damning indictment.
We should note one more reason for the media's Iraq failure: the Bush administration. The mainstream media, especially in its current enfeebled form, is simply not equipped to deal with a regime as secretive, manipulative, vengeful and, not to put too fine a point on it, malignant as the present one. Watching the mainstream press try to contend with the Bush-Cheney gang is like watching the Polish cavalry galloping up in 1939 as the Wehrmacht tanks approach.
So has the media learned its lesson? And what does the future hold? In many ways, the media has definitely improved. After the war turned south and the WMD failed to appear, most news organizations began to get much tougher on the Bush administration. The New York Times, in particular, has found its backbone, roasting the administration for its incompetence and duplicity and turning an increasingly skeptical eye on its claims of progress in Iraq. And from the beginning of the war, the media's reporting from the field in Iraq has been far better than its analysis.
The problem, of course, is that the press only really turned on Bush when his ratings began to fall -- another indication that the Fourth Estate has become more of a weathervane than a truth teller.
The final verdict is not yet in. The media has improved, without question, but it has a lot of making up to do. The structural problems -- psychological, institutional, ideological -- that played so big a role in its collapse have not gone away, and there is no reason to think they will. And then there's war, which reduced so much of the media to flag-waving courtiers. If the media has learned that a bugle blast can be sounded by a fool, that not every war the United States launches is wise or necessary, and that self-righteousness is not an argument, maybe something can be salvaged from this sorry chapter after all.

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It's no secret that the period of time between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq represents one of the greatest collapses in the history of the American media. Every branch of the media failed, from daily newspapers, magazines and Web sites to television networks, cable channels and radio.

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This has not been your typical presidential election - not for the voters, the candidates or the news media. James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, and Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The Times, discuss how the election season went, good and bad, for members of the press.
JIM RUTENBERG Well, James, here we are - finally at the end. Or are we? Let's cross our fingers and assume we are. Phew! Historians are going to be examining the cadaver of Election 2016 for quite some time. But the news media doesn't have time for history. Tomorrow is another day, and a new test. And I'm wondering, along with a lot of other people: Does the media emerge from this campaign year having learned important lessons that made it better - quicker to call a falsehood false (or, if you prefer, a lie a lie) and treat all comers seriously? Or does it limp into the new phase of coverage unrepentant, ready to make similar mistakes all over again?

JAMES PONIEWOZIK One thing this election has reminded us is how broad "the media" is. It's cable news. It's Gawker (or was). It's Twitter, Donald J. Trump's weapon of choice, and every morning show that let him phone in interviews. It's NBCUniversal, which brought you "Morning Joe" and Billy Bush and the "Access Hollywood" bus and "The Apprentice." It's traditional news operations like ours. It's Breitbart (and may be Trump TV). It's fake news on Facebook and everyone rifling through a WikiLeaks dump.

So will the media be better in 2020? Worse? Yes. And yes. And there will be more of it.

I'll start with one topic you raised: reporters' willingness to truth-squad. I hope that Mr. Trump's asymmetric, weirdly brazen dishonesty has broken reporters of the bad habits of false equivalency, euphemism and forced balance. The job of journalism, always, is to describe reality as we honestly find it, regardless of appearances. I hope that's a permanent change. I fear that the profession will decide Mr. Trump was a one-off, an asteroid, a special circumstance requiring Special Trump Rules.

RUTENBERG We talked about those Trump rules yesterday, and as I said then, it turns out the Trump rules were really just plain old journalism rules: Collate what's true from what's false; analyze, contextualize, dig, dig, dig - for scoops and hidden details (and hopefully not your own grave!).

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Mr. Trump during a forum hosted by Matt Lauer, right. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

PONIEWOZIK And do it without regard for how it makes you look to one camp or another.

RUTENBERG The new twist was that we had an asymmetry no working journalist had ever seen. Donald J. Trump lied more than his opponent did. It meant that the press was seen calling him out for falsehoods more than it was seen calling out Hillary Clinton, who fibbed less ( but did aplenty). That created the impression of imbalance. But so much of it was reflecting what the reporting found, objectively. For instance, last week, when Mr. Trump described a scene in which President Obama verbally attacked a pro-Trump protester at a rally when Mr. Obama had clearly, in fact, argued the protester deserved respect and a hearing, well, that called for a robust fact-check. I mean, reporters have eyes.

That doesn't mean Hillary Clinton got a pass. When she referred to half of Mr. Trump's supporters as hailing from a "basket of deplorables," it was widely aired. The Times broke the story that she was keeping a private email server at her home in Westchester, New York. The media covered the WikiLeaks emails from her adviser John Podesta in ways that produced a fair share of rough headlines for Mrs. Clinton; scrutinized pay-to-play optics at the Clinton family's foundation, and examined her record on Libya and Syria with an eye on what she'd do as president.

PONIEWOZIK The press covered Hillary Clinton like the next president of the United States. The press covered Donald Trump like a future trivia question (and a ratings cash cow).

From the get-go, too much coverage of the race has been informed by a belief, overt or unconscious, that Mr. Trump couldn't win. Last fall, the political press, like their sources, dismissed the polls and stuck to the belief that people would never actually pull the lever for that man. The mind-set stuck well into the primaries - even data-minded Nate Silver succumbed to the siren call of punditry.

RUTENBERG Yes, If you think about it, she received coverage befitting a traditional politician running for president; he received coverage of a billionaire reality-television star who turned politics into performance art and sparked a powerful movement in the process.

PONIEWOZIK And in the general election, it affected expectations. NBC's September "commander-in-chief forum" with Matt Lauer [of "Today"] was a low point. Mrs. Clinton got an appropriately tough vetting. Mr. Lauer told Mr. Trump "nobody would expect you" to have studied up on foreign policy before running. (Nobody? Do they cover that at orientation?)

Boris Epshteyn and Campbell Burr during an internet show from Trump Tower. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times

It's not as simple as, "the press went easy on him." In some ways this made for devastating or dismissive coverage. But only one candidate was treated like she might be elected, set policy and make appointments.

RUTENBERG One thing lost in that whole controversy - Mr. Lauer and Mr. Trump were once related by corporate synergy. (Which makes them, what, corporate media cousins?) "Today" used to regularly run segments on the previous night's edition of "The Apprentice." So here was Mr. Lauer having to switch from asking Mr. Trump about Omarosa's antics to those of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. And I bet this threw him. Still, your point stands.

PONIEWOZIK Yes. My biggest piece of advice for covering a candidate like Donald Trump: Just pretend he's the Republican nominee for president. Within the bubble of conventional wisdom, this didn't happen enough.

RUTENBERG I was struck by how many times I saw prominent journalists say, "Gee, I don't know anybody who would vote for Mr. Trump, I'm going to have to work on that," or some such. Take it from me - having friends who supported Mr. Trump from early on didn't mean you were going to expect him to win the Republican nomination. But there was without question a big disconnect between mainstream reporters and Trump supporters (and a segment of Bernie Sanders supporters, too, for that matter).

And this will be key in the days, months and years ahead. The press needs to explore the frustration of those many Americans who think free trade's gone too far; that immigration threatens the national fabric; and that insiders from Washington, Wall Street and the media have rigged the system against them.

PONIEWOZIK This election has exposed a lot of bubbles. Chuck Todd this morning writes that if coastal journalists were more in touch with economically hard-hit areas, they'd have seen the Trump phenomenon coming. As a southeast Michigan native, I'll give him that. But I would add that a more diverse press corps would have been less likely to deflect so much of the overt racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism on the campaign trail as "economic anxiety." And it wouldn't be so quick to equate "working class" with "white."

Mrs. Clinton being interview by Mr. Lauer. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

RUTENBERG I think that's right, in that the press corps' lack of diversity - not only in terms of race but also class perspective - left it blind to the power of the movement that carried Mr. Trump to the nomination. That said, I think that to the extent that the Trump campaign surfaced pockets of racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny, the news media did a good job calling that out for what it was, which doesn't come naturally.

Either way, this will be a real wasted opportunity if there isn't a lot of probing, fearless reporting about how much racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism exist in the culture. It has surfaced. Let's not let the rug roll back over it all when this is done.

That brings me to this question: When this thing wraps, do you think the mainstream media will revert to where it was before this campaign started, treat this as one nightmare it would just as soon forget? Or does it emerge forever changed?

Because whatever you say about this year's election coverage, it killed at the box office.

PONIEWOZIK The drive for ratings and clicks will not change, whatever anyone says. Jeff Zucker recently said maybe the network should not have aired so many of Mr. Trump's rallies unedited.

I take these morning-after regrets the same way I do a political party's postelection autopsy. Wake me up if they ever implement it.

Another looming question about the postelection media is if Mr. Trump will be a player in it. Especially if he loses, I'm dubious of Trump TV as a full-fledged cable channel. That's expensive - an online subscription service might be an easier way to cash in. That, and that brand depends on his image as a winner. In defeat, even claiming a rigged election, he may be a tougher sell.

But who says Trump TV would only be a thing if Mr. Trump loses? A President Trump would make aggressive use of the media. Why not his own de facto state TV? What would stop him: his deep respect for the norms of political propriety?

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Can the Media Recover From This Election?

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This has not been your typical presidential election - not for the voters, the candidates or the news media. James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, and Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The Times, discuss how the election season went, good and bad, for members of the press.

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The notion of a government "by the people, for the people" is one of the bedrock concepts of American democracy, but the reality is that policy outcomes are often influenced by a wide range of factors, not merely the candidates whom voters select to represent them on Election Day.

"Special interests" and lobbyists are often derided for their perceived distortion of the democratic system, although there is a case to be made that the battle of organized interest groups has always constituted the essence of democracy. Still, certain kinds of representation frequently raise hackles - arms and oil industry lobbying, for example, or former U.S. Senators reportedly representing Russian banks that are the target of sanctions. Further, what critics most object to is the way that money buys access, and here there is ample evidence of new, troubling changes in the U.S. system: In a single decade, between 2000 and 2010, the amount spent on lobbying Congress and the federal agencies more than doubled, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which curates useful data on the issue. Although the aggregate amount spent on lobbying has technically declined slightly, many believe that the practice of "soft lobbying" has meant that some lobbying money is now going "dark" - and is not being formally reported.

According to survey data from the American National Election Studies series, an increasing number of Americans believe that government is run to serve a few large interests rather than for the benefit of all - indeed, over the past four decades, the public's views on this have radically shifted toward a more skeptical position. Beyond perceptions, however, what does the best research reveal about this situation? How much do we really know? In a 2014 literature review, "Advancing the Empirical Research on Lobbying," John M. de Figueiredo of Duke and Brian Kelleher Richter of the University of Texas, Austin, provide an overview of leading scholarship, as well as suggest promising social science methods and new data sources. The paper, published in the Annual Review of Political Science, notes that, over the past decade, research on lobbying has "progressed substantially," but large questions remain. The researchers therefore set out to synthesize "what we know about lobbying, what we would like to know about lobbying, and how we might make headway in finding answers."

Key findings from the review include:

Lobbying is widespread throughout the U.S. political system; previous research puts lobbying expenditures at the federal level at approximately five times those of political action committee (PAC) campaign contributions. For instance, in 2012, organized interest groups spent $3.5 billion annually lobbying the federal government, compared to approximately $1.55 billion in campaign contributions from PACs and other organizations over the two-year 2011-2012 election cycle.

Corporations and trade associations comprise the vast majority of lobbying expenditures by interest groups - more than 84% at the federal level - compared with issue-ideology membership groups, which makes up only 2% of these expenditures.

While lobbying is presumed to be influential, the actual rate of firms engaging in lobbying is relatively low - approximately 10% of all firms.

Large corporations and groups are more likely to lobby independently than smaller groups, which tend to lobby through trade associations. Some researchers suggest that smaller groups lack the resources to cover the high fixed costs of a lobbying organization.

Lobbying efforts often increase when (1) the issues in question are considered more salient; (2) there are high stakes for the organized interest based on certain policy outcomes; and (3) the policy issue is related to budgeting or taxation issues.

There is mixed evidence on the question of whether lobbyists derive more value from what they know (expertise) or whom they know (personal connections). The fact that some lobbying firms specialize in certain policy areas suggests that issue expertise could be valuable. However, other research suggests the connections might be more important; a study examining revenue of former legislative staffers who become lobbyists found that a lobbyist's revenue declined 23% after the legislator for whom the lobbyist worked was defeated in an election or retired from Congress.

Determining and quantifying the impact of lobbying on policy outcomes can be challenging given the many other factors that can influence decisions (omitted variable bias). Using quasi-experimental methods - including differences-in-differences and instrumental variables - could better isolate these causal mechanisms.

New data could also improve research on lobbying. In particular, detailed transactional data over longer time periods, combined with current archival datasets and other external datasets could be valuable. In addition, it could be useful to examine data outside of the United States to determine the generalizability of any U.S.-based empirical work.

The authors conclude by noting the many opportunities for future research in the field of lobbying. Some key questions include: Why do so few firms lobby, relatively speaking? (After all, more than $2 trillion is spent each year by the federal government, so even $3.5 billion in lobbying seems a small amount to compete for that.) Can we quantify the usefulness of connections as opposed to subject matter expertise? How effective is lobbying as a policy instrument as opposed to other forms of interest group pressure, such as media campaigning, endorsements, or grassroots organization?

Related research: For data sources on lobbying, also see the Sunlight Foundation's Lobbying Tracker. In recent research, Matt Grossman of Michigan State University - author of Artists of the Possible: Governing Networks and American Policy Change since 1945 - explores the political power of interest groups. He highlights the fact that they're "cited nearly as often as legislators and administrators in stories of policy change." A 2011 study in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory looked at campaign contributions and subsequent government contracts. The researcher analyzed data from 367 firms with corporate PACs active between 1979 and 2006 across a variety of industries, and found that for each additional $201,220 in campaign contributions, a firm could expect to receive an additional 107 contracts on average. This increase translates into roughly $5,300,000 in additional revenues.
Keywords: lobbying, corruption, politics

Last updated: September 4, 2014

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Lobbying, special interests and "buying" influence: What research tells us, and remaining unanswered questions - Journalist's Resource

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The notion of a government "by the people, for the people" is one of the bedrock concepts of American democracy, but the reality is that policy outcomes are often influenced by a wide range of factors, not merely the candidates whom voters select to represent them on Election Day.

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I've noticed two distinct ways social media have changed the way we talk to each other about politics. Clearly, they have changed a lot, maybe everything, but two fairly new phenomena stand out.

One happens on Facebook all the time. Just about all of your friends are posting about the election, nonstop. And there are a few who brag about deleting friends, or who urge friends to unfriend them over their political leanings: "Just unfriend me now." Or something like "If you can't support candidate X/Y, we don't need to be friends anymore." Or "Congrats, if you're reading this, you survived my friend purge!" Etc. You know how it goes. This public declaration, if not celebration, of the end of friendships because of politics.

And then on Twitter, there's the public shaming of those who dare disagree with or insult you. (I am guilty of this.) Someone tweets at you with something incendiary, bashing the article you just shared or the point you just made, mocking something you said about politics, calling you stupid. You quote the tweet, maybe sarcastically, to prove it doesn't affect you. But it does! You tweeted it back, to all of your followers. It's an odd cycle. A rebuttal of nasty political exchanges by highlighting nasty political exchanges.

This is our present political social life: We don't just create political strife for ourselves; we seem to revel in it.

When we look back on the role that sites like Twitter, Facebook (and Instagram and Snapchat and all the others) have played in our national political discourse this election season, it would be easy to spend most of our time examining Donald Trump's effect on these media, particularly Twitter. It's been well-documented; Trump may very well have the most combative online presence of any candidate for president in modern history.

But underneath that glaring and obvious conclusion, there's a deeper story about how the very DNA of social media platforms and the way people use them has trickled up through our political discourse and affected all of us, almost forcing us to wallow in the divisive waters of our online conversation. And it all may have helped make Election 2016 one of the most unbearable ever.
A problem with format
Fully understanding just how social media have changed our national political conversation means understanding what these platforms were initially intended to do, and how we use them now.

Both the technology itself, and the way we choose to use the technology, makes it so that what ought to be a conversation is just a set of Post-it notes that are scattered.

At its core, Twitter is a messaging service allowing users (who can remain anonymous) to tweet out information, or opinions, or whatever, in 140-character bursts. For many critics, that DNA makes Twitter antithetical to sophisticated, thoughtful political conversation.

"Both the technology itself, and the way we choose to use the technology, makes it so that what ought to be a conversation is just a set of Post-it notes that are scattered," Kerric Harvey, author of the Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics, said of Twitter. "Not even on the refrigerator door, but on the ground."

She argues that what we do on Twitter around politics isn't a conversation at all; it's a loud mess.

Bridget Coyne, a senior manager at Twitter, points to several features the company has added to those 140-character tweets: polls, photos, video, Moments and more. She also told NPR that the 140-character limit reflects the app's start as a mobile-first platform, and that it's different now. "We've evolved into a website and many other platforms from that." And she, like every other spokesman for any major social media platform, argues that sites like Twitter have democratized the political conversation, helping give everyone a voice, and that's a good thing.

But even accepting that point, and respecting every new addition to Twitter's list of tools, we find a way to keep arguing. Even the candidates do it.

One particular exchange between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush (remember him?) illustrates this new political reality. On Aug. 10, 2015, Clinton's Twitter account posted a graphic with the words: "$1.2 trillion, the amount 40 million Americans owe in student debt."

Jeb Bush's campaign replied, tweaking Clinton's own graphic to read "100%, The increase in student debt under this Democratic White House."

Those two tweets seem reasonable enough. But there was more. In response to the Bush campaign's response, Team Clinton scratched out the words in Bush's redone graphic, added its own scribbled letters, and etched a large "F" on top, for the "grade given to Florida for college affordability under Jeb Bush's leadership." The campaign tweeted the image with the caption "Fixed it for you."

And then, theBush account replied once more, turning Clinton's "H" logo, with its right-pointing arrow, by 90 degrees, sending the arrow point skyward, with the word "taxes" printed behind over and over. That caption was "fixed your logo for you."

It was an exchange nearing petty; these two candidates were trolling each other. But for the most part it seemed totally normal in a campaign season like this one, and in the digital age in which we live. Establishment political figures like Bush and Clinton (or at least their young staffers) had co-opted the language of social media and mastered the formats, with all the snark and back and forth that come along with it, and with an extra incentive to adopt some of the meanness Trump has exhibited online.

There may be even more problems for Twitter than what real live people are doing on the app. A recent study conducted by a research team at Oxford University found that during the period of time between the first presidential debate and the second, one-third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly one-fifth of pro-Clinton tweets came from automated accounts. Douglas Guilbeault, one of the researchers in the study, told NPR that hurts political discourse. "They reinforce the sense of polarization in the atmosphere," he said. "Because bots don't tend to be mild-mannered, judicial critics. They are programmed to align themselves with an agenda that is unambiguously representative of a particular party. ... It's all 'Crooked Hillary' and 'Trump is a puppet.' "

So, if Twitter is a bunch of Post-it notes thrown on the ground, we now have to consider which of those notes are even real.

The company would not offer its own estimate on the number of bots on its app, or any on-the-record rebuttal to the study's findings, besides the following statement: "Anyone claiming that spam accounts on Twitter are distorting the national, political conversation is misinformed."

Even if there are questions about the number of bots on Twitter, the tone of the conversation there increasingly can't be denied. A recent study from the Anti-Defamation League found "a total of 2.6 million tweets containing language frequently found in anti-Semitic speech were posted across Twitter between August 2015 and July 2016," with many aimed at political journalists. And a Bloomberg report found trolling on the service is keeping the company from finding a buyer.
Facebook and the "echo chamber"
Facebook fares no better in garnering scathing critique of its influence on the political conversation. At its core, it's a platform meant to connect users with people they already like, not to foster discussion with those you might disagree with.

Facebook's News Feed, which is how most users see content through the app and site, is more likely to prominently display content based on a user's previous interests, and it also conforms to his or her political ideology. A Wall Street Journal interactive from May of this year shows just how much your feed is affected by your political leanings.

The company also faced rebuke from conservatives when it tried to share trending news stories on users' homepages; they said the shared articles reflected a liberal bias. And after trying unsuccessfully to begin filtering out fake news stories from users' feeds, Facebook has been increasingly accused of becoming a hotbed of fake political news. The most recent allegation comes from a BuzzFeed report, which found that a good amount of fake - and trending - Donald Trump news is coming from business-savvy millennials. In Macedonia.

In response to these critiques, Facebook pointed NPR to a September post from the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in which he said, "Whatever TV station you might watch or whatever newspaper you might read, on Facebook you're hearing from a broader set of people than you would have otherwise."

In that same post, Zuckerberg also pointed out studies showing that increasingly, more young people are getting their news primarily from sites like Facebook, and that young people have also said it helps them see a "larger and more diverse set of opinions." And Zuckerberg said the company is trying to do a better job of sifting out fake news.

Late last month, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook had helped more than 2 million people register to vote.
It's not just the social networks
Social networks are built the way they're built, but how we've used them this year says just as much about our shortcomings as about any particular network's flaws.

Data tracking trending topics and themes on social networks over the course of the campaign show that for the most part, America was less concerned with policy than with everything else. Talkwalker, a social media analytics company, found that the top three political themes across social media platforms during the past year were Trump's comments about women, Clinton's ongoing email scandal, and Trump's refusal to release his tax returns.

"Social media may have played a role in creating a kind of scandal-driven, as opposed to issue-driven, campaign," said Todd Grossman, CEO of Talkwalker Americas, "where topics such as Trump's attitude towards women, Trump's tax returns and Clinton's emails have tended to dominate discussion as opposed to actual policy issues."

And Brandwatch, another company that tracks social media trends, found that on Twitter, from the time Trump and Clinton formally began their campaigns for president, aside from conversation around the three presidential debates, only two policy-driven conversations were in their top 10 most-tweeted days. Those were Trump calling for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States, and Trump visiting Mexico and delivering a fiery immigration speech in Arizona in the span of 24 hours. Brandwatch found that none of Clinton's 10 biggest days on Twitter centered on policy, save for the debates. (And even in that debate conversation, topics like "nasty woman" and "bad hombres" outpaced others.)
Looking to the future
So we end this campaign season with social media platforms seemingly hardwired for political argument, obfuscation and division. We are a public more concerned with scandal than policy, at least according to the social media data. And our candidates for higher office, led by Trump, seem more inclined to adopt the combative nature of social media than ever before.

It's too late to fix these problems for this election, but a look to the social networks of tomorrow might offer some hope.

Snapchat has emerged as the social network of the future. Data from Public Opinion Strategies find that more than 60 percent of U.S. smartphone owners ages 18 to 34 are using Snapchat and that on any given day, Snapchat reaches 41 percent of all 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. Any hope for the social media discourse of the future may be found with them.

Peter Hamby, head of news at Snapchat, says the platform is a "fundamentally different" experience than other social media platforms, in part because, he says, on Snapchat, privacy is key. "I think that people want to have a place where they can communicate with their friends and have fun, but also feel safe," Hamby said.

He also said he is working on figuring out what young people want in a social network and how to make it better. And, he said, social media users increasingly want to rely on their social networks to make sense of the flood of political opinions, reporting and vitriol they're being bombarded with. "One thing that me and my team have tried to do," Hamby told NPR, "is explain the election. ... Because a lot of stuff you see on the Web, and TV, is pretty noisy."

In asking whether social media ruined this election or not, I had to ask myself how my actions on social media have helped or hurt the country's political dialogue - what my contribution to all that noise has been. I'd have to say that even when I've tried to help, I'm not sure I've done enough.

Last month, I shared an article about something political on Twitter. Two women got into an argument in the replies to my tweet. I could tell that they didn't know each other, and that they were supporting different candidates for president. Every tweet they hurled back and forth at each other mentioned me, so I got notifications during every step of their online fight. At one point, they began to call each other names, with one young woman calling the other the "C" word.

I stepped in, told the two that they maybe should take a break from Twitter for a bit, do something else (or at least remove me from their mentions). Both responded. They apologized to each other and to me, and they both promised to log off for a bit. One mentioned trying to play a role in creating a nicer world after the election.

I left it at that, but should I have done more? Should I have urged the two to message each other privately, try to talk politics civilly, maybe think about ways to have enriching, productive conversations online (or better yet, in person)? Should I have asked myself if the words I used in sharing the original article helped lead to the argument? Should the three of us have made it a teachable moment?

Instead, they retreated from their battle positions for a few hours at best, never getting to know the stranger they insulted. And I moved on, and just kept tweeting.

But I had to, right? Making the social Web nicer always takes a back seat to just trying to keep up. There were more tweets to see, more stuff to read, more Internet Post-it notes to throw along our social media floor.

If social media ruined 2016, it's because of that: We haven't stopped long enough to try to sort it all out.

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I've noticed two distinct ways social media have changed the way we talk to each other about politics. Clearly, they have changed a lot, maybe everything, but two fairly new phenomena stand out. One happens on Facebook all the time. Just about all of your friends are posting about the election, nonstop.

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Interest Groups: Crash Course Government and Politics #42

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Political Parties: Crash Course Government and Politics #40

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Media Institution: Crash Course Government and Politics #44