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Media 
Much Ado About One Thing
Does America not care about politics because the media doesn't cover it, or because we cover it to excess? by William Powers ..... Last Sunday, in a front-page, above-the-fold story, The New York Times reported that Democratic Party leaders are "worried about the strength of their field of candidates" in the 2004 presidential race, "and fearful of what they view as President Bush's huge advantage going into next year's election." The next day, in a top-of-the-front-page story filed by the same reporter, Adam Nagourney, The Times revealed that both major political parties have fundamentally changed their White House strategies. Insiders told the paper they now want to win over "core voters" who are intensely loyal to one party, rather than the swing voters once so highly prized. Another story on the same page observed that embattled California Gov. Gray Davis is attempting a "belated personality makeover" that "seems to be partly genuine and partly orchestrated." Over at The Washington Post, Monday's big political news—again, upper front page—was that in the race for the White House, Sen. John Kerry "is struggling to catch fire in early-voting states and adapt to the sudden and race-altering surge of rival Howard Dean." One of Kerry's problems, several Democratic sources told The Post, is that he's "relying too heavily on a team of big-name strategists and too little on letting the candidate run loose." Meanwhile, other political news was breaking. Much of the known media universe was on fire about recent inklings, intimations, and cues—winks and shrugs, mostly, plus several whispers—that Hillary Rodham Clinton might just jump in the '04 race, notwithstanding her own somewhat forceful (though, truth-be-told, hardly believable) denials of interest. And of course everyone, simply everyone, from the BBC to the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, was simultaneously offering coverage of candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger's recently unearthed policy positions on orgies, penis size, and hashish. And that was all over one holiday weekend. I realize that study after study has conclusively demonstrated that Americans don't give a holy hoot about politics. And I know that, as countless talking heads on untold think-tank panels have observed, this is largely the fault of the media. Over and over, we've heard that news outlets that once cared deeply about politics and policy now care only about entertainment news and true crime stories, and that this shift has tragic implications. According to a Harvard University study published a few years ago, the news business might even be "weakening the foundation of democracy by diminishing the public's information about public affairs and its interest in politics." Experts agree: If we're going to save this civilization from ruin, what we need is a lot more political news. But don't you sometimes have a sneaking suspicion, one you dare not share with respectable people who deeply regret the decline of political journalism, that the opposite might be true? That the real problem is not that we have too little political news, but too much? There was a funny moment the other day on CNN. The network aired a "special combined edition" of the shows Inside Politics and Crossfire, at the beginning of which a voice announced, "Live from George Washington University, Judy Woodruff, Paul Begala, and Tucker Carlson." With that Don Pardo-ish introduction, and an audience of lively college kids, you might have thought you were tuning in to journalism with genuine popular appeal. But no. Early on in the show, CNN political reporter Candy Crowley reported that Howard Dean's "asterisk has turned into a star. He leads in Iowa polls, where next-door neighbor Richard Gephardt must win. And he leads in New Hampshire, where John Kerry must stake claim. But before you run out to buy a bumper sticker, consider this: Nobody's paying much attention. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found 65 percent of registered Democrats have not been following the race closely. Only 10 percent are watching very closely." In other words, CNN was staging an elaborate news event in order to bring America a subject it doesn't care about—politics. Despite what's on the front pages of all the papers. Despite candidate Dean's wild explosion of breathless media attention this summer. And despite the fact that all of this White House race coverage is cascading over us a full 14 months before the election. Does America not care about politics because the media doesn't cover it, or because we cover it to excess? I know what the experts would say. That the coverage I'm citing isn't serious. The presidential stuff is all inside baseball, and has nothing to do with real issues. And the California recall story took off only after a movie superstar jumped in. That what we're seeing is exactly the lightweight news that demeans politics and repels voters. Maybe. But if you watch the national political coverage closely—and it's there for the watching, around the clock, as never before in history—what you'll notice amid all the horse-race chatter and the slavering after celebrities are a lot of big issues. War. Taxes. Abortion. Health Care. Such questions figure in almost every story. Even the Arnold orgy story turned into a discussion of whether private morality matters in public life. The media are raising the issues, all right. Maybe if we weren't raising them so often, if we didn't lay it on quite so thick and took a day off now and then, stopped obsessing over every twist and turn on the political beat—in short, if we behaved more like normal voters, who don't think and talk about politics constantly because that's unhealthy—maybe then more of those voters would start taking the whole thing seriously.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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