Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias respond to the Washington Post’s ombudman’s finding that their coverage of health care reform has focused on strategy rather than policy consequences. Krugman suggests some reasons why it’s easier and safer for journalists to write on strategy. Yglesias adds this:
bq. After all, the vast majority of people in this day and age don’t watch cable news channels and don’t read newspaper articles about American politics. The minority of the population that does do those things presumably consists of people who find coverage done the way it’s done to be pretty interesting. If you changed it all around to focus more on things like “what does this mean for average people?” or “what sorts of people would be impacted by this bill and how?” and less on things like “what tactics are Republicans using?” or “was it a mistake for Obama to emphasize cost control?” then you’re running a good chance of alienating the audience you have, and just kind of hoping that the people who are currently tuned out would tune in.
Some research suggests that he is right. In this post, I summarized a nice study by Iyengar, Norpoth, and Kahn. In the fall of 2000, they sent subjects a CD-ROM with campaign stories from the 2000 race and then tracked the attention they paid to different categories of studies. They found:
bq. Given access to a wide variety of news reports about the presidential campaign during the weeks immediately preceding the 2000 election, we find that voters were drawn to reports on the horse race and strategy. Strategy reports proved especially popular among readers with higher levels of political engagement.
In short, the actual audience for news wants to hear more about strategy. Why? Probably because they already know what candidate or, in this case, policy they favor — at least in broad terms (e.g., yea or nay on health care reform) — and so they want to know whether their preferred policy is “winning.” That’s what strategy coverage provides them.