But there are costs for news organizations caused by their horse-race obsession — costs that many in the business still don’t comprehend. Horse-race coverage is substance-free journalism that simply recounts which candidate is up and which one is down. That means that in addition to a lack of investigative and accountability journalism, there is also a dearth of in-depth stories on policies and issues.
Campaign officials take advantage of the media’s horse-race fixation when it benefits them. But increasingly, they are trying to break through the horse-race noise by going completely around the press to get their messages out to the public. It is a trend that threatens to make the political press irrelevant.
Trump was one of the first candidates to fully embrace the new ways available to campaigns to skirt the press. In 2016, political reporters were not prepared for Trump’s prolific use of social media, which enabled him to speak directly to his supporters and influence the campaign narrative on an hourly basis. Reporters found themselves writing daily stories about each Trump tweet, which had the effect of allowing Trump to hijack the horse-race coverage.
The trend among campaigns to ignore the press and its fixation on horse-race coverage reached new levels at last week’s Democratic National Convention, where more than 200 online influencers were credentialed by the Democratic Party to post content for their followers on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms. That move deeply angered some in the traditional political press, but the Democrats saw it as a way to communicate more directly with young people and others turned off by conventional campaign coverage.
Yet the political press still doesn’t understand that campaigns are going around them in part because of their obsession with the horse race. They don’t get the connection.
And so horse-race coverage is likely to keep its iron grip on political journalism — an arrangement that leaves candidates unchallenged, important questions unasked, and voters uninformed. It’s an arrangement that Trump is eager to exploit.
But there are costs for news organizations caused by their horse-race obsession — costs that many in the business still don’t comprehend. Horse-race coverage is substance-free journalism that simply recounts which candidate is up and which one is down. That means that in addition to a lack of investigative and accountability journalism, there is also a dearth of in-depth stories on policies and issues.
Campaign officials take advantage of the media’s horse-race fixation when it benefits them. But increasingly, they are trying to break through the horse-race noise by going completely around the press to get their messages out to the public. It is a trend that threatens to make the political press irrelevant.
Trump was one of the first candidates to fully embrace the new ways available to campaigns to skirt the press. In 2016, political reporters were not prepared for Trump’s prolific use of social media, which enabled him to speak directly to his supporters and influence the campaign narrative on an hourly basis. Reporters found themselves writing daily stories about each Trump tweet, which had the effect of allowing Trump to hijack the horse-race coverage.
The trend among campaigns to ignore the press and its fixation on horse-race coverage reached new levels at last week’s Democratic National Convention, where more than 200 online influencers were credentialed by the Democratic Party to post content for their followers on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms. That move deeply angered some in the traditional political press, but the Democrats saw it as a way to communicate more directly with young people and others turned off by conventional campaign coverage.
Yet the political press still doesn’t understand that campaigns are going around them in part because of their obsession with the horse race. They don’t get the connection.
And so horse-race coverage is likely to keep its iron grip on political journalism — an arrangement that leaves candidates unchallenged, important questions unasked, and voters uninformed. It’s an arrangement that Trump is eager to exploit.