Dollarocracy (38 page)

Only the most crudely authoritarian states erect the sort of barriers that the United States maintains to entry into the debates by so-called minor-party candidates. And why? The fool's argument against expanding the number of contenders is that debates involving more than the nominees of the two big parties—which, conveniently, control the access to the debates through their joint commission—is that it would somehow confuse the electorate. As if Americans aren't quite as sharp as the French. Adding more candidates would not create confusion. It would add clarity.
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In 2012, had Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein joined Obama and Romney for the debates, it would not have been necessary to listen to a pair of adult men trying to distinguish between Obamacare and Romneycare. The debate could have explored real alternatives, with a working physician explaining why a “Medicare for All” program would be dramatically more efficient, economical, and humane than what either the Democratic president or his Republican challenger was proposing. Had Libertarian Gary Johnson been present for the predictably empty wrangling about whether America is “broke”—as opposed to suffering from broken budget priorities—the former governor of New Mexico would have pushed the parameters of the discourse out to where the American people are thinking. He could have proposed bringing American troops and resources home from policing the world's trouble spots, a wholly sensible fix that would make the United States safer, richer, and more popular.

By the standards of most countries, Stein and Johnson were qualified to join national debates. Both had secured places on enough state ballots to win the electoral votes needed to assume the presidency. No, there was not much chance that the alternative candidates were going to become front-runners; there was every chance, however, that their presence in the debates might have run their numbers up. But, of course, the point of expanding the range of debate is not to help or hurt particular contenders. The value of adding more candidates to the debates is in the quality and diversity of ideas they bring and in the prospect that they might force the candidates to address—perhaps even embrace—those ideas. In 2012 in France, Left Front candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in that country's presidential race raised the issue of taxing speculators. Mélenchon won only about 12 percent of the vote, but by the time the campaign was done, both the sitting president, conservative Nicolas
Sarkozy, and the man who beat him, Socialist François Hollande, were proposing their own variations on the Robin Hood Tax.
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Could Stein, Johnson, or Constitution Party candidate Virgil Goode have added as much to the American debate as an experienced campaigner like France's Mélenchon did? A credible case can be made for each of them. Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico, debated Romney during the Republican nomination fight. Goode, a Virginia legislator and member of Congress, served initially as a Democrat and then as a Republican. Stein, as the Green nominee for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, debated Romney several times, with major media outlets declaring her the winner.

So why not let them in? Oh, right, the rules. But the rules that have been adopted by the Commission on Presidential Debates are based on a deal cut by Democratic and Republican powerbrokers. Either major-party candidate could have called for opening up the debates and the other would have a hard time keeping them closed.
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Unfortunately, neither opted for openness. Why? Because neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney was all that excited about getting dragged into a real debate. And thanks to the way in which the big parties have rigged the process, neither Obama nor Romney had to worry about any interesting questions, unexpected issues, or pointed challenges interrupting their joint appearance.

The debates provide a reminder of just how routinized our campaigns have become and of the extent to which traditional media outlets are complicit in the dumbing down of the political process—not merely by excluding the full range of candidates and ideas but by covering even the major-party candidates as predictably as possible. It is regrettable but true that what passes for campaign coverage these days hardly makes anyone wish the media had greater resources. All the patterns that developed over the course of the second half of the twentieth century persist, and they have grown only more severe with less countervailing material. What remains of the coverage is disproportionately concerned with the presidential race.

As Ralph Nader put it, the 2012 election coverage was “a dreary repetition of past coverage. Stuck in a rut and garnished by press cynicism and boredom,
media groupthink becomes more ossified every four years.”
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Issues that polls show are of great concern to voters—such as corruption, money in politics, the failed drug war, and America's military adventurism—are nowhere to be found in the press coverage because “legitimate” candidates do not include them among their talking points.
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And issues that ought to be the concern of independent journalists representing those outside of power, such as the significant levels of poverty, even extreme poverty, that mark the United States as an outlier among advanced economies, are nowhere to be found. FAIR's 2012 examination of campaign coverage by eight elite media—including PBS's
NewsHour
and NPR's
All Things Considered
—found that only 17 of their 10,489 stories covered poverty in any substantive manner. In short, the concerns of the weakest and least powerful 20 percent of the population did not exist.
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Glenn Greenwald accurately described the only remaining thread of professionalism guiding election coverage:

           
At best, “objectivity” in this world of journalists usually means nothing more than: the absence of obvious and intended favoritism toward either of the two major political parties. As long as a journalist treats Democrats and Republicans more or less equally, they will be hailed—and will hail themselves—as “objective journalists.” But that is a conception of objectivity so shallow as to be virtually meaningless, in large part because the two parties so often share highly questionable assumptions and orthodoxies on the most critical issues. One can adhere to steadfast neutrality in the endless bickering between Democrats and Republicans while still having hardcore ideology shape one's journalism.
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Bill Moyers and Bernard Weisberger got it exactly right when they observed, “Sacrificed to the ethos of entertainment, political news—instead of getting us as close as possible to the verifiable truth—has been reduced to a pablum of so-called objective analysis which gives equal time to polemicists spouting their party's talking points.”
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The reigning motif remains the horse race. It is inexpensive and mindless to cover elections in such a manner and gives the illusion of actual reporting. Endless discussions of polls, pointless predictions, and assessments of how well a candidate's spin is working are the order of the day. Maybe struggling candidates need to cook up some better spin? The 2012 election followed the recent pattern: the Pew Research Center determined that “coverage of
the two candidates overall was fairly balanced.”
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“A good deal of the difference in treatment of the two contenders,” Rosenstiel wrote, “is related to who was perceived to be ahead in the race.” Once that factor was eliminated, “the distinctions in the tone of media coverage between the two nominees vanish.”
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Commercial pressures to hype the campaign like a sporting event are ever present.
Variety
's Brian Lowry noted how commercial news media are “breathlessly chronicling the campaign's every twist” because they “have a vested interest in ensuring the audience stays engaged, right until the end.”
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“Journalists themselves concede that to maintain daily or hourly tension in the contests they promote, they have little choice but to elevate minor poll shifts into major developments,” Sasha Issenberg wrote. “The truth is that we aren't even that good at covering the horse race.”
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Sabato said reporters become obsessed with what he termed the “Gaffe Game,” a singularly poor way to evaluate candidates. “When we tire of Gaffe Game, let's have a POTUS spelling bee. Would be about as revealing,” he tweeted.
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Media outlets obsess about misstatements and missteps—few of which ever move poll numbers—not simply on debate nights; they do so every night.
Politico
's Dylan Byers wrote that “because of the pace established by Twitter and the Internet, the latest ‘gotcha' moment snowballs faster than ever. For a reporter pressed to be ahead of the cycle, assuming conscientious-objector status would be suicide. Once one credible journalist takes the bait, everyone takes the bait.”
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The phenomenon is so common that
Mother Jones'
Adam Serwer coined the term “dumbgeist” to refer to the plethora of “manufactured controversies, substance-free media obsessions” in campaign coverage.
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The tidal wave of unabashed lies told by candidates during the 2012 campaign raised hopes there would be a newfound role for news media as aggressive fact-checkers. Jay Rosen thought fact-checking was “something every full-service news operation should do.”
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And indeed this was a golden age for fact-checking, but the news media had nowhere near the resources to make this a significant part of the campaign coverage or the courage to stick to it when politicians ignored them and accused them of being biased.

Even the serious campaign coverage often revolved around horse-race themes. “Some journalists think of themselves as mini-campaign consultants,”
Bob Woodward said.
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Their work can be sophisticated assessments of campaign strategy and tactics, occasionally it includes reporting on actual substantive issues, but it is generally about how well candidates can manipulate voters.

We admit to being political junkies who have spent countless hours assessing the minutiae and trivia of American politics. We can devour and enjoy horse-race coverage as much as any other political junkie. But by 2012, even we found ourselves agreeing with the Ohio journalist who wrote, “I love politics, but I hate campaigns—this year's especially.”
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The degeneration of all political coverage into horse-race minutiae that never got beyond a slurry of polls and inane partisan talking points was too much for us to stomach. For the vast majority of Americans, who are not political junkies to begin with but who retain a stake in having a news media and a government that actually address the crucial issues of our times, elections become a chore. They know they should pay attention, but they aren't given much of consequence to pay attention to.

In truth, they might be better off if they did not try. Horse-race coverage is not just bad for journalism. It's bad for democracy. As Jonathan Chait noted in the final weeks of the 2012 campaign, “Rampant horse race coverage affects the outcome of the race. . . . Campaign coverage devotes far too much attention to which candidate is winning, and far too little time to conveying information that voters might use to make up their minds. Instead, the horse race coverage takes the place of the substantive coverage, and the candidate with the lead appears decisive and competent, and the trailing candidate faintly ridiculous.”
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So even though journalists may claim that horse-race coverage is a clinical examination of the contest and thus wholly nonpartisan, it ends up shaping the pattern of the campaign and perhaps even the result. That's not good for journalism or for democracy.

The decline of campaign coverage has been masked to a certain extent because the gutting of newsrooms has also encouraged what Herbert Gans described as the conversion of all political news into campaign coverage. As political campaigns have become permanent, so has campaign coverage. Political journalism has been subsumed into campaign coverage. So what journalism resources do remain are disproportionately devoted to either campaign coverage or the increasingly cynical assessment of public policy from a campaign
angle, in the worst horse-race mode described above. “At times,” Gans wrote, “it appears as if no government decision is ever made if it does not support White House campaign strategy.”
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Strategy coverage is cheap and easy to do, lends itself to gossip and endless chatter, and provides the impression that the public is being duly served and serious affairs of state are under journalistic scrutiny.

The nature of 2012 campaign coverage was not really a surprise. “The 2012 presidential election is 15 months away. The first primary vote will not be cast until almost
six months from now,”
Greenwald wrote in August 2011.

           
Despite that, the political media are obsessed—to the exclusion of most other issues—with the cast of characters vying for the presidency and, most of all, with the soap opera dynamic among them. It is not a new observation that the American media covers presidential elections exactly like a reality TV show pageant: deeply Serious political commentators spent the last week mulling whether Tim P. would be voted off the island, bathing in the excitement of Rick P. joining the cast, and dramatically contemplating what would happen if Sarah P. enters the house. But there are some serious implications from this prolonged fixation that are worth noting.

                
First, the fact that presidential campaigns dominate news coverage for so long is significant in itself. From now until
next
November, chatter, gossip and worthless speculation about the candidates' prospects will drown out most other political matters. That's what happened in 2008: essentially from mid-2007 through the November 2008 election, very little of what George Bush and Dick Cheney did with the vast power they wielded—and very little of what Wall Street was doing—received any attention at all. Instead, media outlets endlessly obsessed on the
Hillary v. Giuliani
showdown, then on the
Hillary v. Barack
psycho-drama, and then finally on the actual candidates nominated by their parties.
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