You know it’s election season when people start complaining about horse-race journalism.
Since I am one of the people who habitually complains, what exactly is my beef?
It is not in a simple sense an argument against “bias” or a notion that political coverage should be unadorned by narratives. I’m not asking for the media to be either fair or balanced. I completely understand why doing deep structural analyses of sociopolitical sentiments and various kinds of medium-term political mobilizations seems beyond the scope of daily news coverage, and why the storytelling embedded in “horse-race” coverage of elections is a big part of the hook that gets people to read that coverage.
At least some of what anti-horse-race complaints point to as more accurate or true is just as questionable when you look at it. I see people this morning observing that the “baseline” for interpreting the meaning of an uncommitted vote in the Michigan primary is 2012, when 11% of Michigan Democratic voters also voted uncommitted in an election where Obama ran unopposed. That’s one other data point. You can’t be asserting that it represents what normally happens in Michigan when an incumbent President runs. That’s a big part of the problem with election analysis period: the dataset is in fact really small if we’re talking Presidential and Senate races in the United States, and virtually every Presidential race has had elements that might be rigorously characterized as non-comparable to every other case within a roughly contemporaneous setting. It’s silly to think that the the objective data stands there, clean and simple, and is contaminated subsequently by story-telling intending to talk up a ‘horse race’.
The real issue with horse-race journalism begins to unveil itself in light of the insistence by mainstream American journalists that they’re objective, unbiased, or otherwise not trying to control the outcomes. That’s even sillier than thinking that there’s self-explaining clean data lying underneath the narrative veneer. When the New York Times sees 13% uncommitted as signalling a big problem for Biden but says that 39.5% for Nikki Haley in South Carolina is an “overwhelming win” for Trump, you know that the story is being told towards particular ends.
That end is not necessarily to promote a particular match-up in order to sell more journalism, or even to favor or privilege one candidate because of an ideological match between the publication and the candidate. What is being defended is the role of dominant mainstream journalistic publications to confer legitimacy within the electoral system. They don’t want to grease the skids for a particular candidate, but they do want to be one of the hands that puts the crown on the eventual winner. They don’t want to make the choice of candidate, but they do want to define what the real issues are and who should be taken seriously.
All that work happens through story-telling; it is the work of meaning making. Contestations over who gets to make meaning were far more limited and easily controlled in the post-1945 print era. Most cities had one or two major daily newspapers and an alternative paper; many large towns had one daily or sometimes a weekly newspaper. There were a small number of news magazines, some news-adjacent magazines with a strong acknowledged political affinity and three major networks, and a few outlets for radio journalism. Major published books on policy or political issues sometimes shifted public culture on a particular question. Political protests, rallies and campaigns also did a fair amount of meaning-making work, both as reported through the media and through direct and personally reported experience by protesters and witnesses. Civic organizations that hosted speakers might also move common understandings of major issues.
Now it’s widely acknowledged that we live in a much more many-to-many communicative environment where meaning-making in public culture is much harder to control and where interpretative communities are much more numerous, fragmented and isolated from one another. Within the broad confines of that generalization, I think it’s fair to say that the major survivors of the print era who still want to be viewed as the respectable mainstream providers of news and and information are intensely anxious to retain their imagined predominance as meaning-makers. They want the stories they tell to be the determinative stories that both explain why elections have particular outcomes and confer legitimacy on those outcomes. They want the power that Henry Luce is portrayed as having in “The Right Stuff”, to allow Gus Grissom to be Gus. (And to be the vehicle that gets—or denies—the bucks to Buck Rogers.)
Hence the kinds of coverage that constitute horse-race journalism. The New York Times and its few surviving near-peers want to have the explanation of electoral politics contained within electoral politics and they want to be the source of those explanations. They don’t want the explanation to lie in deep sociologies, complex histories, ambivalent and contradictory sentiments and semantics. They don’t want the history of the nation-state as a form to be the key to events unfolding right now or to have to do a deep dive into globalization as a process.
You can’t tell an exciting story about how Cody’s Wish became American Horse of the Year in 2023 if the real story is actually the economics of horse-breeding, the unfolding of various institutional structures behind major horse-racing venues, the complexity of gambling regulations, the changing training of jockeys, and the shadowy landscape of drug usage and injury with regard to horses within the racing industry. All of that may be important, but you can’t craft a simple narrative from it that lets you anoint a genuine champion or lightly downplay a lucky mediocrity. You can either explore complicated truths or be the power that determines what goes up and what comes down. Not both.
Elections are already story engines, and a natural site to do the transient work of controlling meaning and producing legitimacy. The terror that the top editors, their political reporters and their authenticated pundits feel is that increasingly the interpretations they offer of politics-within-electoral-events are more and more easily ignored or dispersed, and the legitimacy they want to help produce of little to no value.
This explains why the NYT, the Washington Post, and other mainstream sources of news and punditry keep trying to reinsert themselves as having a “normal” kind of “objective” relationship to Trumpism, of being “fair and balanced” even as they are being measured for whether their necks will fit in a near-future ideological guillotine. It is because they cannot bear to contemplate a political formation that has no dependency on their meaning-making work and will have no interest in the narratives they offer to legitimate its future victory. They are trying to demonstrate that they will continue to be useful in these roles regardless of who wins. They are not just playing for mere survival, but to retain an imagined seat at the table. To be, if not the hand that puts the crown on the victor, to wrestle a pinky into the scrum that touches the crown as it is unsteadily jostled onto that head.
The urgency of that desire in a social and cultural environment that no longer favors their uncontested predominance often means that their story-telling is rather threadbare—obviously arbitrary, full of telling and not showing, bristling with the unconcealed instrumental need to shove some uncooperative or discordant voices out of the picture and to amplify others. Desperation and anxiety are bad for story-tellers. Flop sweat spoils the pitch. I’d rather have the complicated truths, obviously, but if it’s got to be story-telling that tries to make an election exciting, at least make the stories good ones. Scheherazade only lives another day because the stories are good, not because she is micromanaging the sultan’s legitimacy and respectability through their content.
The thing I have against horse race journalism (which I take to be focus on who is likely to win) is that it seems to force out discussion of differences in policies and the likely effects of the policies, and beyond policy, differences in temperament which would affect how politicians behave in unexpected situations.
And, also, they live and breathe and reproduce the fiction that in this country there can only be two sides, two real candidates, a horse race, yes, but unlike most, a competition between but two.