Insider trading

There's lots to excerpt from the excellent 1999 James Fallows essay (it's dated 2002, but was originally published in 1999, when the impeachment craziness was still in full flower) that Matt and Ezra have been playing volleyball with today, but this passage is particularly on point.

Internally driven stories. Institutions fall apart when they start doing what's convenient for internal reasons, rather than addressing the outside world--the customer who has to be wooed, the enemy who needs to be fought, the mystery that has to be solved.

Monica was an "internal" story from the start. It was interesting to people in Washington because it was about people in Washington. The sense of zip in the whole city picked up--as you drove through town, you saw crowds of cameramen outside the grand jury site; pundits, lawyers, and politicians scooted from studio to studio to give their latest views. Meanwhile, in sharp contrast to the O. J. and Diana stories, Monica was not doing much for newsstand sales or viewership. When the Starr Report was finally released, cigar and all, it sold strongly; and niche cable outlets could attract larger-than-normal audiences by concentrating on Monica news. But most weeks the story did not do well for newsmagazines or network news--and yet the media kept dishing it out.

Journalists are not, of course, just shopkeepers meeting market demand. The highest achievement of the trade is to make people care about and understand events or subjects they had not previously been interested in. This requires journalists to be internally guided to a large degree--but not just by parochial, insider obsessions. Sally Quinn's notorious "This Town" article, published in the Washington Post the day before the 1998 election, attracted immediate attention because it was smoking-gun proof of how parochial the obsessions could be. ^[4]People who had spent their careers in Washington--and referred to it as "this town," as Quinn pointed out--were mad at Clinton for (as they imagined it) making their culture look bad, and they took it out on him with their reports. An internal compass is one thing; a Marie Antoinette–like assumption that the masses are wrong is something else.

As Fallows points out, when anything Lewinsky related showed up on the newsstands, circulation declined. People outside of the immediate pool of pols and the Washington press corps were not only driven mad with the frenzy of the story, they were driven mad by the general public's refusal to care about the president's indiscretions. "Where's the outrage?!" was the mantra, you may recall.

We're seeing the same thing on a smaller bore with the primaries campaign. We are months from the first votes being cast, so you would think that the "journalists" covering the campaign or the pundits paid to discuss "policy" would have more to write about than Hillary's "revealing" outfits or whether Obama's answer "sounded presidential." Perhaps some context on the issues around Obama's answer might be something worth covering. And what was Ms. Clinton talking about when she was wantonly showing so much...breastiness? Who knows? Who cares? For the press covering the election, it's not about what separates the candidates substantively; it's about how the candidates differ in style. Not what they say, it's how they say it. In other words, which candidate best matches the portrait of the Washington press corp of what a president should look like. In other, other words, which candidate is going to fit in the best in "this town."

Truth is, they aren't really interested in what the candidates are saying because, as Washington insiders, they know it's all a show put on to impress the rubes and the hoopleheads who aren't savvy enough to know that this is all just an enjoyable day at the races.