Remember November 2004?

American Journalism Review does. AJR's Rachel Smolkin provides a "behind-the-scenes" look back at media coverage of that fateful election night on Nov. 2. The main points of interest (for me):

• First, the positive: "'Across the campaign, I thought there was a lot of very good coverage that demonstrated that newspapers and broadcast networks do learn more each cycle about how to cover campaigns,' says Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. 'You got a lot, I thought, of quite impressive coverage on phenomena like fundraising and the use of television commercials, and quite sophisticated demographic analysis by my colleague Ron Brownstein and others."
  
• More mixed: "Fundraising prowess fueled media attention, in some cases leading to sophisticated reporting, such as the Washington Post's two-day series in May exploring links between fundraising and access to the administration (see "Follow the Money," August/September), but often producing a mind-numbing array of horse-race, money-chase dailies."
  
• The not-so-positive: "Of course, McManus adds, the media did fall 'prey to the temptation to chase rabbits,' to fixate on what he calls 'ephemeral controversies' such as the Swift Boat saga and the missing explosives in Iraq. 'But each of those ephemeral controversies was a metaphor for a larger issue,' he says. 'They weren't trivial, just ephemeral.'"
  
• The critical: "National Journal's [William] Powers faults the usual 'herd thinking' for chilling more creative political journalism--and he's not talking about the sort of creativity displayed by CBS during the National Guard document fiasco. Powers says coverage was 'way, way too poll driven' and blasts polls as an 'addiction' for the media. 'It's very hard to come up with something new every day. And these numbers provide newness,' Powers says. 'It zaps a lot of resources and energy and reduces the campaign to numbers in a way that is not helpful to democracy.'"
  
• The very critical: "During the political conventions, the broadcast networks abdicated their civic responsibilities in search of higher ratings from sexier reality shows. The cable networks galloped into the void, but too often padded downtime with shouting heads and insipid spin from party officials."
  
• More critical stuff: "Another Powers peeve: 'Every four years, we have this story line about the youth vote--'The youth vote is going to be gigantic.' The story never pans out, but we kind of go through these ridiculous rituals.'"
  
• . . . "And don't get him started on the media's 'gigantic obsession' with red and blue states. 'The red-blue theme is so overdone and also really reductive,' Powers says. 'We have this red-blue motif because we have a two-party system in which we go into the booth and are supposed to choose between two parties,' not because everyone falls neatly into a red or blue category. 'Yet we play this story up because it's sexy; it's easy; it's simple. It was easy to have that map after the 2000 election, but it portrays the country far too simplistically and does a disservice to the public.'"
  
• And then there's this: "The media also would better serve the public--and the English language--by bucking the prevailing clichés of each election season. In 2004, candidates 'barnstormed' the country, appealing to one-time 'soccer moms' who metamorphosed into 'security moms' after the terrorist attacks. Pollsters combed those 'red and blue states' to gauge the preferences of a 'polarized' and 'closely divided' electorate, wondering whether the 'youth vote' could tip the election but flummoxed by the 'cell-phone generation.' In the end, as pollsters and journalists foretold, it all came down to the 'ground game' in Ohio, 'the Florida of 2004.' Sort of."