The major US media sources continue their breathless coverage of the election by ignoring every lesson from their prior mistakes and repeating the usual horserace nonsense. Look at their focus on the latest polls. Early polling only measures name recognition (“Hey, I’ve heard that guy’s name!”). They like reporting it because the numbers change a lot, but drama isn’t the same as ‘news.’ And every network and broadcast organization runs articles and Op-Eds asking who ‘won’ the debates. It’s all nonsense – and they know it – but off they go anyway. Even Rolling Stone decided to rake the candidates in descending order.
Look, Joe Biden tops the polls because his name is the only one that most people have heard before. He’d been Veep, you know? That helps. The rest of the Democratic candidates are good people, but almost nobody could pronounce Buttigieg, much less spell it. (Hell, even I had to look it up.) We just don’t know the rest of the field.
Yet.
But we will. With time, the candidates get more chances to show their stuff. We’ll learn what they stand for, what they’ve done, and whether we really like them for an executive position. But until then, the polls are junk. We don’t have race winners before the starting gun.
And all the news sources understand that simple fact. That’s why the pundits bandied stuff like ‘name recognition’ as window dressing, hoping that we’d be distracted by the big words. In any rational society, “Battered Joe Biden drops 10 points after first debate!” is a headline that should only qualify the author for sudden unemployment. And yet all the other sources do it, too. And the horserace? A news search on “Democratic Debate winner” returns millions of hits that I’m not going to link because they’re all just twaddle.
Anyway, now we’ve had the first debates. People are talking, finally, about the ideas. Even our news leaders suggest the debate has shifted to the real stuff, even if they don’t tell you what that ‘stuff’ is. That’s good progress. But polls are still only drifting a little from name recognition. Quick! What’s Harris’ position on climate? What would Buttigieg do about the war in Afghanistan? Bet you don’t know, but don’t sweat it. I don’t think I know, either. We still barely know whether George Hickenlooper is a candidate. (He isn’t.)
The media could be more useful if they covered what the candidates say, but apparently, that’s too difficult. Look, it’s not that hard. Just do what you already do for Republicans: read their press releases on the air as if you’re doing something dramatic. It’s not even close to reportage, but it’s better than this horserace rubbish.
Give it a try. Maybe you’ll win a prize or something.
