Campaign Bubble

Ken Silverstein interviews Chris Lehmann about media coverage:

The debates between the candidates could be important, but the conventions are stultifying media spectacles where no one expects anything to happen. The reason so much political coverage on cable is crap is that there is an effort to portray the campaign as this floating spectacle; it’s devoid of public interest. Not to be too conspiratorial, but there is an economic interest at stake because you want people to come back and watch the same drivel the next day, in the same way that I obsessively check the sports section to see how the Cubs did. That’s why the VP speculation is so perfect for cable; you can fill up all that airtime without any reporting. There are studies of the content of broadcast news that show that something shy of 10 percent of the coverage is original reporting. They’re constantly re-running the one time they got some hapless anchor to stand in front of a hurricane, or it’s just incessant talking head speculation.