7/27/2019 PTX BAD

1/2

Media journalism is widely off the mark when it comes topolitical reporting. Journalists dont have an understanding, orinclination to understand, deeper causes of political issues.Political science shows most political journalism to be widely

inaccurate. This should indicate the insignificance of the PoliticsDA.Marx 10(Greg Marx, Political Scientist, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Embrace the Wonkhttp://www.cjr.org/feature/embrace_the_wonk_1.php?page=2 June 10th, 2010)

While Bais tone verged on the scornful,most journalists arent looking to start a fightwith political science. But theyre not often looking to it forinspiration, either. Diligent reporters may turn to political scientistsfor a useful primer on a new beat; lazy ones know how to use the fields quote machines to pad a story.Butwhen it comes to daily coverage of the core subjects of politicallifeelections and campaigns, public opinion and voter behavior,legislative deal-making and money-grubbingthe relevance of a field in which an idea mightgestate for two years before seeing print to a news cycle that turns over three times a day is not always obvious. As journalists go, Jeff Zelenyof The New York Times is hardly averse to political science he studied it as an undergraduate, and can list the names of academics hes

relied on. But for most of what he writes, he says, The reality is, its a newspaper story or aWeb story.You cant go into abstract theories. In recent years, though, there have been signs that views areshifting. In June 2007, Ezra Klein, then an associate editor for the liberal journal The American Prospect, put out a request for links tobloggers who aggregate and keep track of political science research. The call yielded almost no responseevidence that, while economistshad colonized the wonkier regions of the blogosphere in the same way theyd taken over many D.C. policy shops, political scie ntists hadlargely ceded the terrain. But Kleins item caught the eye of Henry Farrell, a professor of political science at George Washington Universityand a contributor to the early group blog Crooked Timber. The post, Farrell says, made it very clear that there was a demand out there forpolitical scienceand he encouraged his GW colleague John Sides, whod been tinkering with the idea of a blog devoted to expanding thefields audience, to meet it. In November 2007, The Monkey Cagethe name comes from an H. L. Mencken line about the nature ofdemocracywas launched. It had two central goals: to publicize political science research, and to provide commentary on current politic aleventsa task, Sides presciently acknowledged in a mission statement, that might involve testing and perhaps contesting propositionsfrom journalists or commentators. The site quickly established credibility among political scientists. And it has attracted a respectableaudience as a niche blog, drawing more than 30,000 unique visitors in peakmonths. But perhaps The Monkey Cages greatest influence hasbeen in fostering a nascent poli-sci blogosphere, and in making the fields insights accessible to a small but influential set of journalists andother commentators who have the inclinationand the opportunityto approach politics from a different perspective. That perspectivediffers from the standard journalistic point of view in emphasizing structural, rather than personality-based, explanations for political

outcomes.The rise of partisan polarization in Congress is often explained , inthe press,as a consequence of a decline in civility. But there are reasonsfor itsuch as the increasing ideological coherence of the two parties,and procedural changes that create new incentives to band togetherthat have nothing to do with manners. Orconsider the president. In press accounts, hecomes across as alternately a tragic or a heroic figure, his stockfluctuating almost daily depending on his ability to connect with

voters. But political-science research, while not questioning that a presidents effectiveness matters,suggests that the occupant of the Oval Office is, in many ways,a prisoner ofcircumstance. His approval ratingsand re-election prospectsriseand fall with the economy. His agenda lives or dies on Capitol Hill.

And his ability to move Congress, or the public, with a good speech or a savvy messagingstrategyis, while not nonexistent, sharply constrained.These powerful, simple explanationsare often married to an almost monastic skepticism of narratives that cant be substantiated, or that are based in datalike voters accountsof their own thinking about politicsthat are unreliable. Think about that for a moment, andthe challenge to

journalists becomes obvious: If much of whats important aboutpolitics is either stable and predictable or unknowable, whats the

value of thesort ofnewsa hyperactive chronicle of the days events,coupled with instant speculation about their meaningthat has

become a staple of modern political reporting? Indeed, much of the media criticism on TheMonkey Cage is directed at narratives that, from the perspective of political science, are either irrelevant or unverifiable. In the wake of the

http://www.cjr.org/feature/embrace_the_wonk_1.php?page=2http://www.cjr.org/feature/embrace_the_wonk_1.php?page=2

7/27/2019 PTX BAD

2/2

special election in Massachusetts, Sides wrote numerous posts noting the weakness of the data about voter opinion there and faulting

journalistic efforts to divine the meaning of Scott Browns vict ory. Yes, I knowpolitical science is abuzzkill,he wrote in one. Andno one gets paid to say We dont and cant know. But thats what we should be saying. This isthe sort of thing that John Balzthe son of veteran Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz, and a Ph.D. student in political science at

the University of Chicagomight be referring to when he says the fieldproduces what are, from ajournalistic perspective, unhelpful answers.