Scammers, Camelot, and the demand for fake news

Last week I walked past the single worst Black Friday ad I ever saw. A local clothing store advertised “openning” 10-6 on Thanksgiving. Yikes! Was this the worst Black Friday behavior I have ever seen in my neighborhood? It’s close, but I saw worse at the local Best buy a few years ago. While I was shopping for a laptop bag, a woman was complaining to customer service that she was locked out of her accounts. Apparently someone texted this woman claiming that she had won an award. She just needed to send her banking information to get paid. Of course, it’s a scam. I turned around to look at the low level best Buy employee and saw the quick look of terror on his face. How does he explain that this potential customer just got scammed and there’s nothing he can do to help? How can he be sympathetic to this confused woman walking in to Best Buy with her child instead of wanting to scold her for falling for such an obvious deception?

If you’re an old enough Internet user, you probably remember scams involving “Nigerian princes.” In case you forgot, this was a scam where someone sent bulk spam email claiming to be a Nigerian prince who has to move money offshore due to political unrest. If you give your bank account info, they would wire $10,000 to your account. Most people realized this was too good to be true, even before the scam became publicized and tech firms dedicated resources to blocking these spam e-mails. However, there were some people who desperately wanted to believe there was a Nigerian prince who would make them rich. Selfishness and laziness beat suspicion and careful research. The selfish and lazy might be pretty easy to exploit.

 

If you follow tech news over the last week, you saw headlines that the top 20 most shared stories on Facebook had more fake news stories than real ones. Google and Facebook both blocked fake news sites from their advertising sales networks this week – now that the US Presidential election is over. Facebook has always had an unusual set of “community standards” for regulating content. Visual depictions of violence and sexuality are generally banned. The company frequently claims it has tweaked its “News Feed” algorithm to show “higher quality content” as opposed to clickbait. However, Facebook has always strenuously objected to the idea that it is a media company with a profound influence on journalism. Here’s Mark Zuckerberg, trying to answer questions about whether his company helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election:

“Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

I’m not sure anyone really believes this, even Zuckerberg. Facebook acted against fake news sites four days after Zuckerberg’s quote (and after Google’s ban). It’s a field day for people who want to blame Facebook’s lack of transparency – or social media more broadly – for Americans’ declining interest in facts and evidence. As much as people have a right to be frustrated that Facebook didn’t do anything about fake news until after the election, it’s not like Facebook was the birth of online scams. People have tried to use the Internet to try and exploit selfish and lazy users for decades. They used other technologies before the Internet. Instead of blaming Facebook, we should ask why would people want to spread misinformation with their friends and family?

My take here is probably different than most people because I actually covered a secession campaign. In 2002, the San Fernando Valley wanted to secede from the rest of Los Angeles. The secession movement started as part policy oriented and part symbolic. Every public school in Los Angeles County is in one school district. Valley voters wanted to break away from the unwieldy behemoth. They also believed their tax dollars were being used to subsidize the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles. On a symbolic level, Valley residents felt like they were taken for granted by a remote city hall. It wasn’t a rural / urban divide like presidential elections. If Valley voters formed their own city of Camelot, it would have been the seventh largest in the country! (Sidenote: Camelot won the vote for what to call the new city.)

By the time I started covering the story, Valley secession leaders had already conceded on their largest policy grievance. Camelot would still be part of the LA Unified School District. I talked to voters who said “what’s the point of seceding if we’re still tied to LAUSD?” Other reporters thought there was no way secessionists could get enough votes. They needed to run up enough votes from within the Valley to get a majority citywide. Secessionists didn’t fully want to campaign on keeping Valley tax revenue in the Valley either. The county ruled that Valley residents would have to financially compensate the rest of Los Angeles if secession passed, to make up for lost tax revenue.

With only a weak policy case, potholes became a major campaign issue! Some Valley residents saw every pothole as a reminder that their area didn’t get a “fair share” of city services. Mayor Hahn dispatched construction crews to smooth over problems, both literally and figuratively. (At this point I am obligated to say I don’t live in the Valley and my street gets enough flooding to become one lane only during moderate rain.) Valley secession leaders wanted voters to feel like City Hall was remote. They also reminded people that most local media organizations were located in the older area of the city and not the Valley, so they were biased against secession. The Los Angeles Daily News – which was based in the Valley – was decidedly pro-secession.

There are several things that make San Fernando Valley secession different than the 2016 presidential election. While the Valley has more Republicans than the rest of Los Angeles, it is still a majority Democratic area. Every voter is urban. The two sides had relatively similar arguments about what would happen if the Valley seceded. Valley secession leaders did minimize the potential disruptions. LA’s black neighborhoods emphasized how they would lose out financially if the Valley seceded, but there were few accusations of racism. In the end, the pro-secession movement was even more based on emotion than Donald Trump’s campaign. Trump promised to make American great again. He made incredibly vague policy promises. Trump’s promises may not be credible. But Valley secession leaders openly said they couldn’t deliver on their initial promises of divorcing LAUSD and keeping all the tax revenue.

A slight majority of San Fernando Valley voters still believed secession was a good idea and voted to leave the city! Why would they believe the promises of the secession campaign, even if all the evidence said secession wouldn’t provide tangible benefits for Valley residents?

• Disrespect: Various activists had discussed secession for decades. They felt they were not given a full share of public services, even though they paid a disproportionately high bill compared to the rest of Los Angeles. I don’t remember anyone counting what percent of potholes were unfilled in the Valley as compared to downtown. “We aren’t getting a full share” may be one of those things that is entirely symbolic and not based on rational calculation.
• If the moral claim rings true, people may turn a blind eye to empirical fact: The facts were not on Valley secession’s side. The county set the terms for secession after certifying that the Valley would be a viable independent city. The terms were not ideal for secession leaders. One balked and abandoned the campaign. The rest held on to their cause, despite mounting empirical facts about how any new city could not do what they wanted to.
• People emphasized moral claims when policy issues were murky: In 2002 the Los Angeles Unified School Board was so dysfunctional that creating a new Valley School Board with new criteria and policies seemed a lot easier than fixing LAUSD. School board governance played a major role in the 2005 mayoral race and Antonio Villaragosa’s first two years as mayor. No one really knew how to solve the giant mess. No one had a good policy idea. Voters may have been quicker to embrace the symbolic politics of secession because no one offered a policy solution to the tangible problem of underperforming schools.

Now let’s think about what we know of Trump voters:

• Disrespect: Definitely. Trump voters tend to say the federal government has forgotten them. The political class may not focus on rural areas. Remember, disrespect is a feeling that may or may not have a basis in fact. So is neglect. It’s entirely possible for multiple groups to feel disrespected by the power structure, and for those groups to hate each other.
• If the moral claim rings true, people may turn a blind eye to empirical fact: Trump offered a wide range of campaign promises, and voters didn’t seem to mind when some of these contradicted each other. In particular, Trump’s tax policies clearly favored the rich. When I think of moral claims ringing true, I think back in the first primary debate. Trump was asked if he would back the Republican nominee no matter what. He refused to say yes. Later on he attacked other Republicans for being in lobbyists’ pockets and bragged about buying influence. The moral claim was very clear: “every politician is a self-serving asshole, but I’m the only one who is honest about being an asshole.” That’s when I thought Trump had staying power.
• People emphasized moral claims when policy issues were murky: A lot of industrial workers are facing downward mobility. There’s a tendency to focus on Trump voters not being the absolute poorest, then discounting any kind of economic argument. But Trump voters are disproportionately older. Regardless of partisanship, most of the parents I have met care deeply about their children’s opportunity to have a good life. I spent my teenage years in an area that transformed drastically from farmland to suburbia. I left for college before the transformation was finished, so I’d go home and my parents were going to new malls that didn’t exist when I was growing up there. All of this was positive economic growth, but it’s still alienating. This affects how I think about declining industrial towns? Has any politician really offered a solution for declining industrial towns over the last 20-30 years? There isn’t a good plan for how to help workers whose skills are less valuable today, or the potential alienation of economic change. We got nostalgia and moralizing about trade instead of real solutions.

I can see reasons why the people who supported Trump would also be likely to buy in to fake news. I can see why people would believe the feelings contained in these stories and want to share them widely.

 

At this point, I think other left-leaning writers would just look down at Trump voters and stop writing. Buzzfeed’s story about fake news getting more Facebook engagement than real news feels plausible. It’s very plausible if you don’t know many Trump supporters and you’re looking for some explanation of how they got “fooled.” I retweeted the story without thinking twice. I didn’t even read the study! A friend of mine who voted for Trump posted a critique of the Buzzfeed study design over the weekend. I read the critique, then read the Buzzfeed methodology. Hate to say it, but Buzzfeed fooled me.

Here’s the short version of what Buzzfeed did wrong. They looked up the top 20 fake news stories and the top 20 real news stories. Top 20 lists are highly unequal. The #1 hit is far more popular than #2, but the gap between #2 and #3 is smaller, etc. One huge hit skews the entire set. Remember how Buzzfeed generated massive traffic by posting a dress where people disagreed on what color it was? To make things worse, fake news should have a natural advantage in this metric. If someone is creating fictional news, it is by definition a unique story. Legitimate news outlets don’t get many exclusives. Let’s say 10 people share a fake news story about a Trump-Clinton debate, 5 share the Washington Post’s lead story, 4 share their B story, and 3 more share their third story. More people shared information from the Washington Post than a fake news site, but the fake news site has the biggest single hit. In reality, the one fake news site is competing against dozens of high profile real media organizations and getting swamped in the total volume of Facebook engagement.

So why would people believe the Facebook fake news story?

• Disrespect: Yes. Democrats’ general election campaign was mainly an argument that Donald Trump doesn’t represent the characteristics we want in a leader. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election. Disrespect for progressive values may be an understatement for how progressives feel today, particularly if they are focused on identity politics.
• If the moral claim rings true, people may turn a blind eye to empirical fact: The main people who bought in to Buzzfeed’s fake news story are Democrats who feel big media organizations didn’t do enough to clamp down on Trumpism. Remember how people bought the myth that network TV news was avoiding “issue” coverage – another study based on terrible methods. There that many sophisticated methodologists in the world. I can’t really fault people for not understanding the weird statistical distributions that biased the Buzzfeed study when they were barely mentioned in my years of graduate level statistics classes. (It’s going to take a separate full length post to explain in detail.)
• People emphasized moral claims when policy issues were murky: In this case we need to delete “policy details” and replace it with “research methodology.” It’s easy to do a simple study of media content that compares apples to oranges. It’s much harder to compile a list of potential stories or sources and then analyze how different media organizations treat them. But this is the only way to see how rare breakout hits are and how much more attention they get than any other story or source. The statistical skills needed to analyze these data sets are also extremely rare. When I gave talks at academic conferences, most of the other panelists didn’t know what a negative binomial regression was, let alone the audience. That’s why the burden is on me to explain.

We might all be vulnerable to news that is factually incorrect but feels true. I bought in to a flawed study in an area where I spent a decade becoming an expert on that methodology, because I didn’t bother to check the facts! How can we avoid falling victim to our own weaknesses?

I think the key is to look for potentially disconfirming evidence. I wrote about this at more length yesterday, but here’s the short version. As a person sitting in my apartment writing a blog, I don’t think I have the power to affect the supply of fake, misleading and manipulative political posts. Sure, I could jump up and down blaming Facebook. But here’s the good news. Each of us has tremendous power over our own demand for fake and misleading news. I know exerting this power isn’t easy. It’s tempting to just look for evidence that supports our claims. If you are a debater or a lawyer, you want to make an argument based on the evidence that is the best possible interpretation for your side. Evidence that we might be wrong stinks. Most of the time we don’t want to look for it, and we feel like fools if we actually find it. So why bother looking for evidence that would hurt our side?

In the end, it comes down to a question of whether we want to focus on our own feelings or convincing other people. If you just want to make yourself feel good, there isn’t much of a reason to look for disconfirming evidence. Just remember that someone out there is going to recognize your laziness. If you’re lucky, they’ll just want to embarrass you for buying in to a myth. If you’re unlucky, they’ll see you as a mark, willing to hand over political power in exchange for the right set of feelings. The best way we can empower ourselves is by looking for disconfirming evidence. We can keep ourselves from being fooled. We can’t rely on others to do it for us. At the same time, knowing other belief systems is normally a pre-condition for persuading other people.

Forget “fake” news. Focus on “news” that lacks fact.

In the last week many of my academic friends who don’t study news have gotten a lot more interested in “fake news” as a potential social problem. First there was the Buzzfeed story claiming that the top 20 fake news stories during the last few months of the election got more Facebook engagement that the top 20 “real stories.” (I’ll talk more about that study itself separately.) Then there was the NPR story on a psychology experiment showing that students couldn’t adequately separate more and less credible sources of information. Since most people don’t have direct experience teaching about news media, let alone this new issue of fake news, there’s a lot of things I could share. It’s hard to know where to start. I’m going to write a few separate posts.

Let’s start with the most basic idea of how to stop fake news. Why not just hand students a list of websites and say “these websites are fake!” Google and Facebook blacklisted a set of websites after the election, trying to keep fake news from benefitting from their advertising networks. Giving people a list of websites makes me think of giving someone a fish versus teaching someone how to fish. Is fake political news written by teenagers in Macedonia more important than politicians selectively giving information to manipulate prestigious reporters? What about the growth in political memes that have no facts, only feelings? I think this New Yorker cartoon sums it up well:

 

Caption: “I’m sorry, Jeannie, your answer was correct, but Kevin shouted his incorrect answer over yours, so he gets the points.”

I don’t know if the cartoonist is aware of the irony here. There’s a big banner saying “FACTS DON’T MATTER.” There’s a caption that captures part of the reason progressives resent Donald Trump and his electoral victory. But there are no actual facts in this political cartoon. We don’t know what Jeannie or Kevin said so we can judge the answers for ourselves. Of course, giving facts is not what political cartoons do. They try to present clever mockery. I understand why the cartoon feels true. But the key to distinguishing fake news and other kinds of emotional manipulation is being able to separate literal fact from arguments that feel true or symbolize truth without containing verifiable facts.

Just to give a preview of where I’m going, every style of telling stories has strengths and weaknesses. For my final in Sociology of Mass Communication a year ago I asked students how they would write about the Trump campaign. Why did they choose that style? What are the strengths and weaknesses of that approach? If a student couldn’t talk about the negative ramifications of their decision, they couldn’t get an A. I knew that students could think about the cons of each approach, they could walk out of my class knowing how people may try to use that style of story telling to manipulate them. Sometimes it’s politicians using the media. That’s been one of the main themes of this blog in the past. But since people are mainly worried about fake news today, I’m going to focus more on media producers trying to manipulate our emotions.

I didn’t teach about “fake news” per se when I taught sociology of mass communication a year ago. I’d only change one thing if I taught again this Winter or Spring, and it’s something much broader than fake vs. real news. Fake news is just one kind of manipulation. The New Yorker cartoon is another. Donald Trump dragging out the hot takes over Mike Pence getting booed while watching the play Hamilton is a third kind of manipulation. I’m less concerned about the differences between flat-out lies, tactical half-truths and people relying on emotional arguments because they don’t have facts or evidence to back up their claims. Each form of manipulation can be resisted by asking the same set of questions instead of taking content at face value.

1) How much does the article rely on factual claims or evidence? Some articles are entirely descriptive, trying to relay a set of facts for an audience who didn’t directly see what happened. Other articles rely heavily on moral claims and interpretation rather than empirical evidence. That’s a different type of argument and we’ll get to it in a bit. Traditional interview-based journalism offers quotes as a kind of evidence. Direct evidence from documents is rare.

2) If someone relies on factual claims, where does the evidence come from? Can you clearly trace how evidence traveled from the original source to intermediaries to your brain? For example, reporters interview people and quote them. We don’t know what the reporter decided to quote and what was left out. But we can be fairly certain that the person being quoted said those literal words. Then we can evaluate the reputation of the person being quoted. We can also evaluate the reporter’s reputation. If we can’t clearly trace the flow of information from one person to the next, they may want to hide something. Whistleblowers need anonymity for protection. However, a wide range of political operatives seek anonymity to promote half-truths and misinformation.

3) What emotions is someone trying to convey? Are they trying to make you feel a certain way about things? Some writers and meme creators’ goal is to convey a certain set of feelings. Think of the New Yorker cartoon: it wants to convey outrage. Most newspaper and network TV reporters work very hard not to convey any of their own emotions about the stories they are reporting on. This kind of stoic emotional restraint is pretty rare in other kinds of storytelling. My goal is make sure we all pause and consciously understand where a writer is coming from and what they want us to feel. I don’t want to get my emotions pushed around by anybody, even people I tend to agree with. Any time someone is giving us a set of feelings that we want to believe, we are at risk of not checking their facts and evidence as closely as we should.

4) How honest and up front is the writer about why they are doing what they are doing? I actually haven’t taught this before, but I think it’s an important follow-up to question 3. Every argument has assumptions. If someone is making an argument, how much are they willing to clearly state “here are my goals and my assumptions.” When someone is giving an interpretation of evidence, do they explain why they gave this interpretation? Do they acknowledge other potential explanations and make a case for why their interpretation is better? If someone can’t acknowledge that other interpretations exist, it’s probably because they can’t make a good case for why their interpretation is the best.

My own sense from spending my entire adult life working in or studying journalism is that it’s hard for a writer to excel at giving both factual evidence and feelings. I think it’s particularly hard to combine the two when writing about politics, since the main feelings people convey are moral outrage and judgment. It’s much easier for me to try and combine facts and feelings when recapping a baseball game than in writing this post. That’s why there are tradeoffs. No writer can be consistently good at everything. No one is perfect.

When I teach about journalism, my main goal is to get students to acknowledge these tradeoffs, then ground them in specific examples. Elite media organizations that have access and avoid reporters’ personal judgments tend to defer to sources in order to protect access. When Trump lied on Twitter about the popular vote, many leading news organizations copied his claim in the headline without any critical skepticism. Large news organizations tend to fear an inability to prove an elite source is lying more than they fear publishing an elite’s statement that is probably false. Nixon campaign aides first took advantage of this in 1968 (see Crause’s Boys on the Bus), and it’s been a staple in political operatives’ playbook ever since.

Writers who emphasize moralistic takes and emotion have more incentive to hide, selectively misinterpret or fabricate factual evidence. Someone who really wants to convince me that Trump voters are all racist isn’t all that likely to bring up other reasons why they support Trump. On the other hand, Trump voters who are not explicit supporters of the KKK are trying to emphasize all the non-racial reasons why someone would vote for Trump. Three weeks after the election and I still see both messages from friends, like it was the day after the election. That’s why things like the New Yorker cartoon stick out to me. They encapsulate outrage and victimization, but are not going to persuade anyone who doesn’t already have those feelings deep in their heart before reading the cartoon.

Being self-conscious about what we want from news is hard. I think it has always been hard. We don’t want to acknowledge that every genre of media is imperfect. People who want all-facts news may not want to acknowledge how reporters can be manipulated by powerful sources. People who want a certain set of emotions, moral stance or political ideology may not want to acknowledge there are times they put feelings before facts. Trump exploited this his entire campaign, skewing this election almost entirely towards emotion. Remember that Democrats’ main campaign theme was that Trump was emotionally unstable and personally unqualified for office. We took the bait instead of focusing on a positive message. It’s easy to see something on social media, get agitated, and react right away. This is a more pervasive and bipartisan problem than “fake news.” For another example of what makes this so hard, let’s take the following passage from the end of an article Dara Lind wrote for Vox:

Journalists have long been sensitive to the prevalence of misogyny on social media. In 2016, they’ve become alarmed by anti-Semitism on social media as well. Journalists know and work among women; they know and work among Jews.

Many of them don’t know and work among many people of color. The amount of attention paid to racism on social media (or in real life) among journalists is, accordingly, often disproportionately small — or delayed.

Let’s think about how to factually evaluate the claim that journalists pay more attention to misogyny and anti-Semitism than racism. We could try to construct a database with a list of misogynist incidents, religious bigotry and racism, and then construct a second list of writers and what they wrote about. How often did a particular group of writers tackle a particular topic? This is incredibly difficult, painstaking work. I spent years working on a project like this dealing with media and blog posts from the 2008 election as part of my dissertation. In the end, I could produce criteria for defining statements on race, gender, religion and a large number of other topics. I could produce data on how much a particular set of news organizations preferred or dispreferred phrases on each topic, relative to any other topic.

Even if I provide facts, there is no factual basis for saying whether enough attention is being paid to racism or misogyny or any other issue. The current level of attention is a fact. The ideal level of attention is a feeling. It’s a moral stance. I chose this passage from Lind’s somewhat unrelated article because it does a great job of showing how 100% fact based story telling only goes so far. A description of how much attention is currently being paid to race with no moral claim about how much attention should be paid to race will be unsatisfying for many audiences. Trust me, I have the negative reviews to prove it. On the other hand, moralistic claims that lack evidence are unsatisfying for a different audience. Lind claimed that journalists pay a disproportionately small amount of attention to racism. The rest of the article doesn’t give any additional evidence to support this claim since it is largely focused elsewhere. Unfortunately, that means I have no idea if Lind is trying to manipulate me or not.

If you want to teach critical thinking about media content and not just give students a list of fake news sites, you have to empower students to offer different moral priorities than you. I know some students in my last class liked outrage news a lot more than I did. I assume some of my readers will like it more than I do. That’s fine. My students also liked Buzzfeed’s day-to-day content a lot more than I did, while I wrote lectures while listening to three hours of college football podcasts. I made a point to illustrate a few of my eccentric non-political preferences to set a tone that I didn’t expect them to copy my political, moral preferences either. My goal is to help people make better informed choices about what media we read so we can be aware of what we are not getting. I want us to be able to protect ourselves from all different kinds of deception in the news – particularly from writers we tend to trust the most.

Glad I’m Not Covering Clinton

In the last day or so I have seen a number of contacts retweet the following:

ABC, CBS, NBC have devoted more mins to Clinton emails this year than **all policy issues combined.** https://t.co/Lc2dJIjsoW

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) October 30, 2016

It’s a provocative claim! Since I spent years working on how to count news coverage in different ways, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the methodology used here. Boehlert and his colleagues at Media Matters didn’t do the counting themselves. They picked up on “recent tabulations from Tyndall Report, which for decades has tracked the flagship nightly news programs.” I’ve never heard of Tyndall Report before. (The about page is extremely cryptic.) That not a good sign, but it could also be a good way to learn new things.

Boehlert wrote up this report as something groundbreaking, but he didn’t notice obvious red flags. He copies the Tyndall finding that 2008 was a high water mark for “issues” coverage with 220 minutes. Does 220 minutes for a year’s worth of news seem odd to you? Let’s do a little math. If we are looking at nightly news programs that only broadcast 5 days a week, that is approximately 220 weekdays from Jan 1, 2008 through election day. Which is more plausible: networks haven’t combined for more than one minute per day of “issues” coverage since 1980, or someone is using an awfully narrow definition of issues coverage.

Media Matters only offered the analysis, but I was able to quickly trace the link back to see the author(s) define their methodology:

Issues coverage is differentiated from candidate coverage thus: it takes a public policy, outlines the societal problem that needs to be addressed, describes the candidates’ platform positions and proposed solutions, and evaluates their efficacy.

The amount of time spent on issues coverage represents the attempt by television news to establish a political agenda that is driven by the perceived problems that the country faces rather than those talking points that the candidates select to promote their own causes.

This looks like an incredibly strict definition of “issues” coverage. The author(s) only include stories where the anchors sat down and said “we want to cover issue X” in detail. Bernie Sanders spent a lot of his campaign going from city to city, giving his stump speech. He talked about a lot of issues in his stump speech, like health care and the minimum wage. Certainly the progressives at Media Matters and their core audience remember this. But any media coverage of Bernie Sanders speeches or interviews with him talking about issues would be excluded from this count. Anything candidates say in a debate would be excluded.

The Tyndall Report isn’t counting how much time TV network news spends on issues. It is counting how much time TV networks spend on a very specific “where do candidates stand on the issues” type of feature. I’m not surprised TV networks have moved away from this feature. It works much better online. People can point and click to compare candidates or take interactive quizzes to see how their views line up with candidates.

I think people buy in to this report because it feels true. A study with more methodological rigor would probably find a decrease in time spent on issues. However, one of the main reasons for this is Donald Trump doesn’t spend as much time talking about issues. Hillary Clinton has responded by campaigning about Trump’s negative personality traits. As Boehlert notes, Clinton has 38 issues on her website and 112,735 words of policy fact sheets (he gives AP credit for these facts, which were published on Aug 29). This doesn’t mean Clinton has talked about each issue in detail or emphasized it on the campaign trail.

I could keep blasting “biased” media coverage if I wanted to – it’s an easy bell to ring. But I want to end on a different question. Let’s assume that out of the things coming from the Clinton camp, reporters currently consider her email server to be the most newsworthy. Could Clinton have done something different to change the narrative? Now I’ll explain why I think the answer is yes. When I studied the 2008 general election I found TV networks interest in a topic was somewhat contingent on candidates bringing up that topic. The national elite media organizations that had access to candidates followed the candidates’ agenda, while sites that lacked access were more independent.

Paradoxically, all the coverage of Clinton’s e-mails and the Wikileaks is an unintended consequence of how she chose to present herself for the general election. Clinton’s policies come off as technical, well-polished versions of fairly standard Democratic ideas for the most part. There isn’t much in terms of new thinking to capture people’s imagination. Instead, the way that Clinton has tried to capture hearts and minds is to emphasize personality traits: her experience versus Trump’s poor temperament. If both candidates want the race to primarily be about judgment, any “scandal” about Clinton will stick more.

When I was a reporter I liked writing the kind of stories that the author(s) of the Tyndall Report crave. But I would be bored out of my mind trying to write these stories in 2016. It’s not because Trump is vague on policy. I loved the challenge of trying to show when officials didn’t understand what they were talking about while still conforming to the norms of objectivity. What would bore me is writing about Hillary Clinton’s policy preferences. It feels like a long list of ideas I have heard before. Don’t get me wrong – most of these policy proposals need to be repeated because they never got a fair hearing in Congress. I’m just saying as a former newsman I recognize the lack of new. I’d rather write in detail about a new Clinton policy proposal that shakes up the Democratic status quo, but it isn’t there. New policy ideas and policy differences would be a better topic for Clinton, they would benefit the audience, and they would give reporters a more well rounded diet of things to write about. It would have been to everyone’s advantage. But contrary to the assumptions of the Tyndall report, the only way to get coverage of new policy ideas is if a candidate emphasizes their new policy ideas.

As a national reporter I might be forced to write more about Clinton’s email as the least bad option for Clinton coverage. Then I’d cry and ask for a new beat. I’d rather do features on the voters or ballot propositions than be on the Clinton plane. Ideally I’d get to use Simpsons quotes! For all the attention being paid to the Presidential race, there isn’t a whole lot of actual news, particularly from Clinton.