A Meta-meta-analysis Of Presidential Coverage, Or, Get Over It Already

The hip trend for Presidential coverage these days is to hearken back to the citizen awareness around electoral politics that was prevalent during agrarian days -- citizen-farmers discussing the gold standard over their split-rail fences. Granted, a majority of the population wasn't allowed to vote, but still. Halcyon is halcyon. Today, these lamentations go, political reporting doesn't meet citizens' needs.

First, we observe, the mainstream media spends a lot of time covering the numbers of who's winning where in the presidential race. The numbers are quickly put together and easy to glean from available information. Then, "high-road" journalists spend a lot of time decrying how the MSM only covers the "horse race" and the damage such coverage deals to democracy. This too is easy to write, and requires little to no background.

Well, why, if democracy is in its death throes, don't these analysts just cover the issues themselves?

Two reasons. First, it's hard to do. Picking out specific apples-to-apples information on the candidates' positions means doing a lot of research, and, despite broad talk of issues like health care and Iraq, these aren't decisions that are made in isolated packages. Concepts of health care reform necessarily interrelate with how candidates see the budget and taxation. How to resolve Iraq means answering how Middle East policy should be developed, and ideas around things like conscription.

Second, the candidates themselves aren't eager to spend a lot of time in the weeds on issues. Why, if most people don't care anyway, add a level of specificity to a vague, dewy-eyed policy on Social Security that might turn off a subset of elderly voters -- particularly when your opponents aren't going to make that same mistake.

(The irony here is, of course, the example that Ron Paul's campaign presents: if you do detail specific ideas for arcane components of governance, even bizarre and crazy ones, a large sub-set of your support probably won't understand or care about what you're saying anyway, as long as the aftertaste is freedom or lower taxes.)

The only recourse, unfortunately for democracy, is for voters to research the issues they care about themselves. Which, despite the facility presented by the web, requires a lot of work, and may require direct contact with the campaign -- the volunteers for which likely won't know the answers anyway.

There is, of course, a third reason that reporters don't cover the issues. Reporters are components of a struggling business model. Their job is to capture eyeballs, as the archaic parlance goes. And detailed explications of policy ideas capture very few eyeballs.

Whose fault is that?

Comments

[RTIII]

"Whose fault is that?" EASY! It's the fault of the fascist elites among us who have used their power to eliminate the protections we had in, say, the mid-1970s. Take just one example; the fairness doctrine..­.

Without being educated, the population is easier to control, so, they aren't educated.

DON'T BUY INTO THE MYTH THAT PEOPLE DON'T WANT GOOD REPORTING! Too many people have and it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The current media resembles the media of my father's time in absolutely no ways except that it's media.

What to do about it? ALSO EASY: Force the break-up of consolidated media, return the rules preventing that consolidation, return the fairness doctrine (and related policies enforcing media to serve the public good). This whole "regulation is bad" mantra hasn't worked out for the better of our country or our people, and only serves the already-wealthy.