×
David Bernstein of the Boston Phoenix has a very interesting piece on the ways academics and journalists think about each others' work. There's a lot there, but I want to point to his discussion of the character of the market niches occupied by CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. He argues that CNN is for people who want to get what appears to be the inside scoop (as Alec Sulkin tweeted the other night, "Release the Gergen!"), Fox is for conservatives who want to feel morally superior to liberals, and MSNBC is for liberals who want to feel smarter than conservatives. This is part of a critique he makes of some academics:
They point eagerly to the mass-media infiltration of the Ezra Kleins and Nate Silvers of the world, who Marx points to hopefully as signs of progress for "journalism that is informed by political science." No offense, but I would suggest that those folks, and others Marx mentions, like the terrific Jamelle Bouie and Jon Chait (he also cites my brother Jonathan Bernstein), have reached their current levels of 'mainstream' exposure not because they get things right more than others, but because of the particular marketplace dynamics I mentioned above. I argued above that one of the three available political-media niches is "liberals who want to feel smarter than conservatives." You know what gives people that feeling? Nerds.Although I can't speak for everyone here, I'd say that we at the Prospect are proud of our long tradition of offering the wider media world a supply of nerds and nerdly content, and will continue to do so in the future. More seriously, I think that Bernstein is probably right about the desires of these audiences and how they're being met by these cable networks, but the thing about media content is that no particular piece of it exists in a vacuum. The reason liberals have long been so concerned about Fox is not that the typical Fox viewer (a 70-year-old conservative white man) is going to be persuaded that Democrats are commies. It's that what happens on Fox can bleed out into other media, affecting their story selection and their views of who is important to be listened to.But that cross-pollination can have positive effects too. Political analysis that is informed by a reasonable understanding of policy and the findings of political scientists, and that actually contains some useful information, will hopefully make people smarter. It can even convince "mainstream" journalists that there's a market for something a little deeper than "the other side totally sucks, and you should hate them." The more of it there is, the better. And as hard as it can be to actually offer something edifying in a four-minute cable segment, it can be done. I'm not arguing that the typical day's content on MSNBC is brimming with dense wonkery, but if they respond to their market incentives by sometimes bringing on people who, you know, know stuff, and Fox responds to their market incentives by bringing on **Dick Morris** and **Sarah Palin**, then we can make a judgment that one model is objectively superior to the other in terms of its value to our civic discourse. So when Ezra or Jon or Jamelle become media stars, it's not just good for liberals, it's good for America!No offense. But you can’t think it’s a coincidence or accident that MSNBC prime-time programming is (with the obvious exception of populist-appeal Ed Schultz) a parade of nerds -- people with an aura of academic or intellectual bona fides saying, in clever words and frequent citations, that progressives are right...
That's nothing against Klein or Chait or the rest of them; I don't think they’re doing it as shtick. But I would argue that they have survived and prospered to the extent that they have because of a market demand, in that particular area of political journalism, for a few journos who sound like they pay close attention to academic research.
