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Like everyone else, I appreciated Michael Signer's op-ed lambasting the press corps for their shoddy coverage of foreign policy. But there may be a bit of a grass-is-greener dynamic afflicting his coverage. He writes:
Just entertain the thought for a moment. What if, in the coming months, every major journalist who covers foreign affairs wrote one story that actually recounted what the candidates are proposing on a foreign policy issue. On the Middle East, or the developing world. On energy independence, proposals to help veterans, the critical role of global aid, denuclearization, or how we should deal with rising powers such as Russia, China and India.These stories would tell us what the candidates have proposed and whether their ideas are silly or workable. They would quote experts and present tough criticism and fair praise. They would tell us something about the candidates' characters. They would illuminate the future and tell us something about the past.Michael seems to think domestic policy gets this sort of coverage, but so far as I can tell, it receives nothing of the kind. We simply don't have a media that goes into detail on policy proposals and then evaluates their relative worth. We don't have a media that seeks out experts and presents the weight of their opinions. We don't have a media that reads deeply into the interplay of policy and personality. They don't do it on health care, or energy, or tax policy, or attitudes towards international law. They just don't do it.But I think Signer is also right to say that coverage of foreign policy has been particularly bad. For that, though, you have to blame Iraq. Policy disagreements in primaries tend to be very concrete. They're rarely about the underlying philosophy of the proposed policies. And they tend to be on the biggest issues, as not enough people care about differences in tech policy. So, on the domestic side, the focus is on health care, and you get a limited debate over mandates that's standing in for a broader debate on the government's role in health care. The debate over mandates isn't terribly important in and of itself, but it's the concrete manifestation of the larger differences in philosophy between the candidates, and it's something the press can report that Clinton supports and Obama does not. But on foreign policy, there's been no such easy wedge issue for reporters to exploit.
