I'm going to be your next senator. Good luck finding out what I stand for!
Wait, there were policies at stake?
A Media Matters study on the coverage of key policy issues in nightly news' midterm election broadcasts finds that 65 percent of network news segments that dealt with the midterm elections failed to discuss the policy issues most important to the American people.
The most important policies according to public polling were the economy, health care and immigration, in that order. The most important policies discussed on the nightly newscasts were whether Ebola and ISIS were teaming up to undermine sales of the new Taylor Swift album.
Noticeably missing from the midterm conversation was any mention of the federal deficit, climate change, or equal pay and benefits for women, all of which weren't mentioned a single time throughout the networks' coverage of the midterms:
Again, we're in a cycle of political illiteracy that can only be broken if either the public or the sources of our "news" choose to break it. Are voters taking into account the policy stances of their elected representatives when deciding whether to vote for him? The dramatic break between voted-for policies and voted-for leaders in these midterms would suggest not. Do voters have the information needed to quickly parse out what the policy positions of the candidates even are, based on how they are covered in newscasts? Not a chance. See Joni Ernst as this season's poster child for the phenomenon, a candidate who went from firebrand conservative to tissue-thin cutout of a candidate to, in the last month, an invisible one. The candidate chose to obscure their policy positions because those policy positions were unpopular; the press was not "granted" access if it was felt they would bring such unpleasantries up; the press chafed at the
lack of access, but in the end could do not a thing.
It's the campaign's job to make their candidate appealing. It is unfortunately not a campaign's job to educate voters as to what their candidate thinks, or how their candidate would govern, or to even be the slightest bit honest. Lying outright is openly tolerated by campaign and press alike. While it ought to be the media's job to both suss out the positions of a candidate and act as arbiter of whether that candidate is worthy of the larger public trust, the role has devolved into the less substantive role of paparazzi trailing their chosen political celebrities. The watchdog role of the press is instead played these days by the campaign tracker, the man with the small camera recording not just the things the candidate wants to be announced, but what the same candidate says in the back rooms, and to their most devout backers.
Cheer up, America; you will learn more about the candidates from watching The Daily Show than the nightly news. You will understand more about economic and banking and technology issues from segments hosted by John Oliver than from the top-of-the-hour soundbites doled out from crack political teams and phrases carefully crafted to say nothing. Isn't that more entertaining anyway? Perhaps what we need to do is turn all the nightly newscasts into comedy shows, where the goal is not to gain access to political figures but to laugh at their obvious insincerities, and then we would have both a healthier democracy and a far happier public.