How To Fix Cable TV News Coverage

On Thursday, I wrote a piece recounting some of the reasons why the cable news networks had missed the rise of Donald Trump's presidential campaign as well as the success of Bernie Sanders. I'm certainly not the only journalist who has an opinion on this subject. In fact, it seems as if every journalist with access to a keyboard cranked out their own version of 'How did we miss the rise of Donald Trump?' this week.

But unlike a lot of those pieces, I'm going to offer up some concrete suggestions about how the cable news networks can improve their coverage going forward. Although I've never worked at a cable network, I do have a fair amount of hard news experience (a TV web site I managed won a Regional Murrow) and at one point was a national news editor responsible for the news mix on a network of 70+ TV station web sites. And I've hosted a fair amount of talk radio, including a nationally syndicated talker back in the day. So I'm not entirely another blowhard web journalist.

PROBLEM #1) Being 'Non-Partisan' Doesn't Mean Every Story Has Two Equal Sides.

If you want to see the downside of this false equivalence, MSNBC's shift to a harder news approach during its daytime hours is a perfect example of what can go wrong. In theory, moving the coverage to a "breaking news" format should have meant MSNBC's programming would be more hard news than its previous personality-driven shows. The problem is that there isn't a lot of news that qualifies as either breaking or important. So the temptation is to just breathlessly cover whatever is happening NOW. And in this presidential election cycle, that led to a lot of live airings of Donald Trump campaign events, followed by hours of panels discussing whatever "controversy" came up during the speech.

When you need to fill time booking panels whose only job is to respond, you tend to book people you know and those who can talk about any subject on the fly. In the case of MSNBC (and to only a slightly lesser extent CNN and Fox), that has meant a lot of discussions that included a GOP strategist and a Democrat who had previously worked for the Obama administration. Oh, sure, sometimes they would mix it by booking a former Bush confidant and a Democratic strategist. But the net result was the same. Side A has their talking points. Then Side B responds in some predictable way. In the end, it's an endless wave of pointless conversations that might be balanced. But they're also deadly dull and entirely useless.

THE SOLUTION: Wean shows away from their reliance on guests with strong ties to the Beltway political-media nexis. If you have to discuss a topic like Donald Trump, bring in people who might not have a conventional wisdom-free take on the subject. If the cable nets had spent less time endlessly discussing the politics of Trump's campaign and spent more resources talking about why he resonates with voters, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

But it's also okay to decide that not every story has two sides. The fact that cable networks managed early on in the this campaign cycle to find two "sides" to Donald Trump's "John McCain isn't a war hero" comment does not bode well for the future of the cable news business. Sometimes it's okay to decide that there's only one logical response to a story. It's okay to be open-minded. But don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

PROBLEM #2) Process Discussions Suck

Political journalists like to talk process the way sportswriters enjoy trading pointless stats. It's a great intellectual exercise and it's a conversation you can have for hours on end. It's also an easy out for cable news networks when dealing with potentially controversial subjects. Rather than confronting the story head-on, it's easier to discuss how the story will impact the candidate's campaign. This is what journalists really mean when they moan about our industry's failings to "fact-check" Donald Trump. Everyone spent entirely too much time discussing the process and not the meat of the story.

THE SOLUTION: The crowd-pleasing solution would be to just attach power-lines to every chair in the studio and zap anyone whenever they use a phrase such as "the optics" or "the politics" of a story. Two zaps if they put the controversy in context by discussing a political campaign that took place more than 20 years ago. Granted, Chris Matthews would be dead in a week. But at least it would change some behavior.

Since there are a lot of very smart laws that prohibit such ideas, we'll go with the second-best solution. When a politician says something controversial, the first response should NOT be 'what does this mean for their campaign?' It's even a worse idea to have a strategist for the other side come on to discuss how this was a boneheaded move. It's a challenge, but what someone says matters. If they purposefully continue to misstate basic facts, then it's incumbent on journalists to continue to ask for clarification. A cable network should be an advocate for the truth, not a high-tech version of a stenographer. A bit of political talk is fine. But aside from the fact that political conventional wisdom has never been more wrong, process discussions never accomplish anything.

PROBLEM #3) Networks Wouldn't Provide Candidates Free Ad Time. So Why Are They Airing Unfiltered Stump Speeches?

This ties into the discussion about covering "breaking news." Live campaign event coverage is cat nip for cable news networks. A political speech - particularly from a candidate like Donald Trump - doesn't just fill airtime with the speech. He'll inevitably say something that will spark a entire news cycle of discussion.

But airing these unfiltered speeches also shifts the power to the candidates and limits the influence of the networks. No matter how smart the panel that follows the speech, it's not going to have the same impact on viewers. It's the difference between discussing why it's not a smart idea to drink and drive vs. simply discussing the accident after it's already happened.

THE SOLUTION: It's a pretty simple one. Don't air unfiltered campaign events unless there's likely to be real news. And news is not "He might say something in response to another candidate." Just show a few seconds of the event live, mention the network will be monitoring the speech in case news is made and move on.

PROBLEM #4) A Lot Of Political Journalists Are Out Of Touch With Flyover Country

I just wrote a long piece recounting the problem, so go look at that story for more context:

Relying on voices who live in the Beltway and/or work with major media outlets based on either coasts ensures you'll only hear variations of conventional wisdom. Everyone knows each other and reads each others work. A subtle involuntary consensus forms based on information gathered from incomplete data sets. This is how otherwise smart journalists can argue that economic inequity won't resonate with voters in 2016 because the "economy is improving." Yes, based on cold government employment numbers that is true. But that isn't the way it feels in Middle America and it's something cable news would have picked up on earlier if they hadn't have been so captured by the need to reflect the conventional wisdom of Washington.

The core problem is that covering politics isn't any different than covering any other beat. The longer you do it, the more you know. But the longer you do it, the more likely it is that you'll fall into the group-think of conventional wisdom. On some level, you'll start to believe that you have it figured out and that will lead to some embarrassing miscalculations. It's the same type of insularity that led the Hollywood trade publications to initially dismiss Netflix or sportswriters to argue the NFL would never have to acknowledge the concussion problem. No matter how good a reporter you might be, when smart people you know and admire tell you something, you tend to believe it's right.

For cable news networks, the only way past this problem is by aggressively courting alternative voices. I'm talking about racial or gender diversity, although that continues to be a problem at every news network. Find some voices who've never worked on a presidential campaign. Seek out some points of view that are dismissed by the mainstream press of both sides.

As an example, I just saw this piece in Paste Magazine from a Bernie Sanders supporter who does a great job of explaining why he would continue to support Sanders even if it costs Democrats the election. He reminds readers that no party has succeeded in having two eight-year presidential terms back-to-back since the 1800s. So there's a real chance Hillary Clinton could be a one-term president:

Remember how the electorate has become incredibly reactionary? Who do you think would benefit from four years of a failed Clinton presidency? The answer is the right wing, and the candidate they cook up for 2020, on the heels of her failure, could make Donald Trump look like Walter Mondale.

But it’s not just about the president, is it? With an unpopular figure in the oval office in 2016, you can bet that the 2018 midterm elections are going to go the other way, and by 2020 there’s a solid chance that the opposition party will hold both houses of Congress. Maybe more importantly, state elections, from governors to the legislature, will swing to the far side in the 2020 presidential election, and that’s a census year, which means that whoever holds power will get to draw congressional maps and define the political direction of our country for the next decade. Losing power in 2020 will be a complete and utter disaster for either party.

But, just as Clinton could spark a conservative backlash, Trump, I believe, would give America’s growing left enough energy to elect actual progressives across the board. Some argue that the left would actually have to move even more toward the center to regain lost influence, but I reject this argument wholeheartedly—we are in an era of flux, and we’re not far from a progressive wave crashing over this country. As I stated above, my belief is that this type of radical transformation is the only thing that can save us.

Voting for Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, will have the dual effect of inviting these consequences, and communicating to the Democratic party establishment that they can ignore progressives, because we’ll support the status quo when they really need us. Why should we make any decision that would simultaneously undercut our growing power and subject us to total Republican domination in four years’ time?

Granted, the piece itself is terribly clunky and close to being too twee for its own good. But these are the arguments you don't hear on cable news, because these people don't have the mainstream credentials network bookers lean towards when finding guests.

PROBLEM #5) Guests Can Say Pretty Much Whatever They Want Without Negative Consequences

The problem with the cable news reliance on partisan guests is that these guests will sometimes drag the conversation into a partisan direction for their own purposes. The most recent example of that was the ability of a guest on CNN to repeatedly bring up the National Enquirer story that alleges Republican Ted Cruz has repeatedly cheated on his wife. In most of these cases, the anchor is too flustered to respond or doesn't want to appear to be taking sides. So the charges just lay there unanswered. And once they've been aired once, every other political operative feels the need to weigh in with their own not-so-innocent take on the "issue."

THE SOLUTION: If I ran a cable news network I'd hire an in-house corrections editor/ombudsman. Their job would be offer near real-time corrections/context to guest comments (In the last hour, guest A said this. That is incorrect and here's why). They would also be responsible for tackling the network ethical and corrections issues that might come up.  The network's philosophy should be that they will be harder on themselves than any outsider could ever be.

I could go on and on about this (and some might argue I already have). So while I do have a lot to more to say about this subject, let me leave you with this thought. Cable news networks live and die with ratings and I realize a lot of their bad decisions are driven by the imperative of driving eyeballs to their shows. But if done well, I think these suggestions would have the dual results of not just improving network news coverage, but increasing the ratings.

What do you think? Follow me on Twitter at @aysrick.