Watching the political debates so far this campaign season
has been a lot more fun than watching submarine races.
That’s the positive spin on the whole mess.
Let’s drill down here:
About 10 percent of American adults watched the first
Republican debate back in early August. The audience numbers declined steadily
for the seven debates that followed. The last Republican extravaganza on
December 15 drew about 18.2 million viewers, roughly 7.5 percent of adults in
the U.S. Last Saturday night’s Democratic mash-up attracted only about 6.7
million, less than 3 percent.
I think it’s a depressing commentary on the quality of the
candidates and Americans’ destructive lack of interest in the politics of the
presidential campaign.
As a freebie, I’ll throw in my sincere disappointment that
the news media have covered the debates so minimally. Why haven’t the major
networks and cable news channels actually demanded that the debates be broadcast
live simultaneously on all major channels? Why has the “analysis” and followup
coverage been more or less all Trump, all the time when it isn’t all “gotcha”
stuff, all the time?
Let’s call it what it is: most Americans don’t care much about
the process of selecting major party candidates for the presidency.
Shame on us.
Woe is us.
Copyright ©
Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment