Answer: when the news media say it is.
If you're like me, you're feeling pretty much starved most of the time for real information about the candidates and their policies and programs and philosophies.
That's no surprise, because most of the media coverage of the current political season has been about anything but the substance, the meaty "what they stand for" stuff…
And this observation is more than just the bad feeling you get when you think about the vacuous news and reportage offered by newspapers and TV news and the cable news talking heads…
...here's proof: only about 11% of media coverage is focused on "the candidates' stands on the issues," according to analysis by the Pew Research Center's non-profit Project for Excellence in Journalism. Almost two-thirds of media reporting was devoted to "polls, advertising, fundraising, strategy and who was up or down," in other words, to the horse race concept of the presidential primary. The rest is commentary on the candidates' personal lives and other stuff.
So, most of what we get is the meaningless, day-to-day musings of pollsters and anchors and experts, and the ever-popular but completely useless "projections" of who will win in November....the latest on who's up in the polls today...breathless reporting on which candidate dropped a percentage point in the conveniently simple but desperately simplistic "approval rating" questions....serious commentary on the format of the latest TV ad....horrifying accounts of yet another partisan billionaire planning to buy an election for his favorite candidate.
The media are convinced that this tripe is entertaining. My own favorite descriptive word is unprintable.
More on the horse race thing....
Well said and sadly true!
ReplyDeleteThe rhetoric usually consists of placing blame on the past administration, or spewing pleasing platitudes to inching ears, and little in ideas on how we can begin to work our way out of this economic quagmire which is rapidly suffocating our nation. The various News Medias, I believe, are all about ratings, and not about fair impartial and informed reporting (Apparently we are too dull to make informed decisions, so they digest the news and give us the pablum sound-bytes we want to hear.) Sensationalize, plenty of hype, and stay tuned to the latest worthless update. Fortunately, there are alternate sources of news and information that can be obtained outside the major networks and newspaper chains.