Over at the Atlantic, the always perceptive Jim Fallows has done a series of posts (1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5) on the utter failure of the traveling press to report accurately on Obama’s China trip.  Fallows main point is that the MSM “manufactured” the perception that the trip was a disaster when in fact it was a relative success.  As Fallows notes, the media focused on two elements of the trip — its visuals (e.g. Obama bowing to the Emperor and the joint Hu-Obama press conference where Obama didn’t take questions) and the final joint U.S.-China communique (in which Obama failed to secure any “concessions”) — that are almost never favorable to a U.S. president.

I think that the first reason for this — and one that Fallows doesn’t raise — is that MSM (and for that matter new media) coverage of summits is not unlike the now-dead art of Kremlinology:  its practitioners are attempting to parse out trends and conclusions from a very limited data set.  If all you have to work with is a series of photo ops and official communiques, then it’s awfully hard to make anything more than the most superficial observations.  And given the fact that you’re largely guessing, chances are that you’re going to get it wrong a big part of the time.  The one difference between today’s media and yesterday’s Soviet experts is that the media is doing it constantly and near instantly.  As a result, its reading of the tea leaves is even less accurate than those now-discredited Kremlin parade-watchers.

Fallows quotes U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman’s reaction to tthe coverage:

I attended all those meetings that President Obama had with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao,” Huntsman said, referring to the Chinese president and premier. “I’ve got to say some of the reporting I saw afterward was off the mark. I saw sweeping comments about things that apparently weren’t talked about, when they were discussed in great detail in the meetings,” he said.

The problem for the media, of course, is that they’re not in those meetings.  (If they were, it would have produced the exact outcome they so blithely reported as reality.)  So reporters are stuck — they can tell the truth (”we have no idea what happened”) and look like noobs, or they can speculate (as most did in this case) and try to look wise.

Moral of the story:  given the choice between looking like a noob and looking like a reporter, almost every White House reporter is going to choose the latter, even if s/he doesn’t know what s/he’s talking about.

The second reason is, as both Fallows and Howard French note, is that the press now covers the White House as if everything it does is a campaign event. Now on one level, this is true, but sometimes — particularly when it comes to foreign policy summits — it isn’t.  But given the habits and tendencies of the media to regard everything as political, it’s almost impossible for them to change their frame of reference.  French calls it “instant scorekeeping,” noting that “[e]verything [the press writes] is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff.”

I think that part of the problem is not especially China-related but strikes me as a reflection of something that’s happening in the culture, particularly in the news culture, partially in response to the habits of television coverage and the increased pressures that come from digital media. There’s a growing reflex of instant punditry and reflexive reaction that works counter to more meaningful analysis. We’re in a state where we’re very often privileging the gut or the knee, as in knee-jerk, rather than thinking more meaningfully about things.

I think French (and Fallows) hit the nail on the head, but they miss one thing here:  one of the reasons the White House press corps uses the campaign frame is that almost every news outlet now assigns its most able campaign reporters to cover the White House (Chuck Todd, white courtesy phone please).  As one White House insider put it to Fallows (on background, of course),

I don’t care if someone criticizes us, I just would like it to be accurate and in context. I fear I am learning that is not the skill of some in the White House Press corps. They are experts on horse races, and so that is the way everything is cast.

I’m only surprised that this official is surprised.  If you’re a reporter, and you’ve splent the past year/months/decade covering campaigns, then you’re going to look at everything as a campaign.  It’s a manifestation of cynicism, and while unhelpful, it certainly is obvious to anyone able to step back and look at the broader question of how the media covers everything.

The third reason is related to the media’s role as a collective expression of a more generalized national uneasiness about the perceived decline in America’s role in the world.  French, again:

The piece that really relates directly to China, I think, and the signals I get from this coverage are equally distressing. The unstated element for me in all of this coverage of Obama’s visit is a kind of hysterical insecurity in the American mind about the possibility—or reality, depending on how you look at it—of American decline. China being the most obvious and immediate symbol of American vulnerability and decline. You put these two things together, the hysterical insta-pundit on the one hand and the hysterical anxiety on the other hand, you end up with this kind of coverage that says essentially that Obama goes to China and doesn’t get instant, public, overt gratification on issues A through Zed and therefore it was a failed trip, or we’re losing ground to China or we have no more standing or we have no more clout or the Chinese moment is upon us—any number of variations on this decline-related theme. . . .

That leads us to the fourth and final reason:  the MSM’s long slow slide into parochialism. French again:

To the extent that the American media embarks on this trip with some version of this very familiar storyline—that Obama, this great celebrity, this great speaker, this media star, this grand personality, is going to stroll through China and win the day—to the extent that they bought into that storyline and expected it to function, at any meaningful levels shows an extraordinary misunderstanding of China. You can fault that storyline on many other levels, but it shows a total misunderstanding of China. The Chinese doesn’t want to be part of our storyline.

The reality is that the MSM views everything through the prism of the United States.  Their coverage of Obama’s trip reminds me of an old National Lampoon parody of local newspapers (be sure to read the sub-head on the story “Two Dacron Women Feared Missing in Volcanic Disaster”):

John Judis at the New Republic demonstrates just how bad this has become in his commentary on the South Korea leg of Obama’s trip (apologies for quoting at length, but I think it’s worth it):

If you are like me, you can’t name the second largest city in South Korea, you’re not within five or ten million of how many people live there, and you’re not sure how South Korea is currently getting on with China and Japan. So you need help.   Both the Post and the Times focus not on South Korea per se, but on Obama’s taking a “stern tone” toward North Korea in his discussions with the South Koreans.  The Post suggests that the two sides have agreed to a “new approach,” which will reject “endless, inconclusive disarmament negotiations” with the North. OK, pardon me if I yawn. Haven’t I read this story about forty-two times since 1995 or so. Having read the two stories I came away with exactly nothing.

Now let’s look at the Financial Times story by Christian Oliver and Edward Luce, which is about one-third the size of the other pieces. The headline reads, “Seoul trades on better ties with Beijing than Washington.” Hmm. That’s interesting and says something important about the balance of power in Asia and the world. Now here are the opening paragraphs:

When George Bush senior visited Seoul as US president 20 years ago, things were simple – the US was the undisputed main ally and trade partner. Astonishingly, there was only one weekly flight from South Korea to China, the communist foe.

Barack Obama on Wednesday visits a South Korea where the US is no longer the only show in town. China is now the main trade partner, with 642 flights each week. While the US is still the chief political ally, Mr. Obama’s cheery soundbites on Korean issues are not convincing Seoul that Washington is dedicating enough thought to the peninsula.

One flight versus 642 flights – that’s a small detail that tells a large story about South Korea and China. And what of the rest of the story? In the other newspapers, I learned that the U.S. is going to “satisfy” the demand of the North to send a “high-level” envoy by dispatching Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang. But in the Financial Times, I learn that China is sending its premier Wen Jiabao and that diplomats in Seoul are not convinced that Bosworth, “a part-time diplomat, keeping a university teaching job in the US,” is the “right man for the job.”. . .

All in all, you get in one-third the length three times more interesting information than in the Times and Post articles, and it’s epitomized in the lead paragraphs comparing the number of flights that now run weekly between China and South Korea.

I’d even take it a step further:  the FT reported on how South Korea had changed in the last twenty years (a story you rarely see — the media reserves that particular frame for its coverage of China), while the NYT and WaPo reported on how the U.S. position on North Korea hasn’t changed in the past twenty weeks.

Journalism used to be the first draft of history.  Now it’s little more than a post-it note.

(An aside about Photo 1:  Is the White House embarrassed about the trip?  I could not find a single photo showing Obama with Hu Jintao or speaking to students in Shanghai.  The only photos were of the students themselves, Obama at the Forbidden City, and Obama’s motorcade (???) heading to the Great Wall.  I had to get this crappy shot from our friends at Dipnote.)

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• Reindeer Games: Bush, Human Rights, and China
• Reality Bites: The New Realism of U.S. Foreign Policy