Sunday campaign down day: advice about media and politicos

It’s another campaign down day! The parties get a break, and so do I (well, except for the Kinsellacast, coming soon). So, here instead, is more wisdom from my book The War Room – on an issue that has been rather hot, lately: relations with the political media covering Election 2025.

Journalists who write about politics – and I write this as someone who has been one, and as someone who has even taught unsuspecting youngsters how to be one — are regarded by most politicians as duplicitous, lazy, amoral confidence artists. They are seen as cynical, soulless sophists, to a one. If Jesus Christ himself were one of their confidential sources, they would burn him in a New York minute, just to get the scoop on his resurrection.

That’s not what I think, having been a journalist. But when the majority of political consultants, regardless of party affiliation, age, race, gender, or place of origin, are asked about reporters, their eyes will start to look for the nearest exit. When pressed, they will mumble something about how they have plenty of friends who are political journalists, or that there are some reporters who they trust, or that they understand that the media are “professionals” and have a job to do. But put away the tape recorder, get a few beers into them, and the truth will eventually tumble out. Political consultants (and, usually, the politicians they represent) hate political journalists. Hate ’em.

In the past couple of decades or so, relationships between politicos and hacks – never easy to begin with — have deteriorated rather dramatically. Statistics do not lie, generally, and the statistics tell the story. In a Brookings Institution study called Campaign Warriors: Political Consultants in Elections, American University professors James Thurber and Candice Nelson reveal the results of a survey that was, in part, about consultants and reporters. Thurber and Nelson conducted two hundred in-depth interviews in 1997 and 1998 with the principals in a number of major U.S. political consulting firms, and found that political activists are “full of negativity” about the news media.

Nearly 70 percent of political consultants, for example, rated the job that journalists do as “poor” or no better than “fair.” It did not matter what party the consultants were affiliated with, the vast majority regarded reporters as stinkers. Only 1.5 percent described journalists as”excellent.” (This works out to be approximately three of the two hundred consultants interviewed, in case you are wondering.)

The older the consultant, the worse his or her views of the fourth estate. Wrote Thurber and Nelson, “Political consultants who have been around longer develop more concrete attitudes toward the media. The experiences or run-ins they have had over the years may have reinforced their beliefs about journalists.” Reporters and editors in search of a silver lining in this statistical storm cloud may point to one statistic: Thurber and Nelson found that only 30 percent of the consultants polled had actually worked for a media organization. Ipso facto, most political flak catchers cannot be expected to understand the doings of political hacks.

But not so fast. Employing awkward sentence structure, the pair of academics note, “Not only were the consultants who had worked in the media not more likely to rate political journalists more favourably, they actually gave more negative ratings. Seventy-five per cent of those consultants who had worked for the news media, compared to 65 per cent of all other consultants, rated today’s political journalists as fair or poor?” Of all the consultants consulted, 50 per cent said journalists were, in fact, getting worse.

Concluded Thurber and Nelson, “Considering the evidence … the results are striking. Political consultants dislike the media … [They] do not like political journalists.” Political consultants must, however, accept one immutable law of nature. They are bound together with media people in perpetuity, metaphorical groom and bride in a diabolic marriage without end. One cannot properly exist without the other. Political consultants need reporters to tell nice stories about the candidates they wish to elect and, naturally enough, unpleasant stories about their electoral opponents. Political reporters, meanwhile, need consultants to provide them with the stories that sell newspapers and boost ratings.

Disliking journalists is a waste of time, in my opinion. I think most journalists are professionals, and – most of the time — they do a very good job. You need them, and they need you.