Rosen on the Heathers

Jay Rosen has a pretty good analysis of campaign journalism.

In his 1990 book about presidential campaigns, (See How They Run) Paul Taylor, then a political correspondent for the Washington Post, talked openly about the press as one key actor in "the pageant of democracy." Taylor knew from experience. He was the one who in 1988 asked Gary Hart whether Hart had committed adultery, a moment of fateful expansion in the "open up, candidate" exam Kurtz is stiill writing about today.

Taylor told stories explaining how the press had played the role of sorter for the public-- which means in place of. In 1988, for example, one reason journalists were so obsessed with character questions was the large number of candidates competing for press attention. He writes:

Somebody had to prune the field, to "get rid of the funny ones," as one 1988 campaign manager put it. There were too many choices, too much information to present, and "the culture was too apolitical" to sustain interest in such a large number of candidates. With the party bosses out of the equation, there was a huge vacuum at the front end of the process. Who would screen the field? The assignment fell to the press -- there was no one else.

If it's true the press plays a vetting role in the campaign, then it must be true that the press is a player. Or to put it another way, political journalists have come to understand themselves as supplier of a service--vetting the field--that the body politic cannot handle itself, because of high information costs and low motivation to bear them. "Too many choices, too much information to present."