Introduction
Once upon a time, political coverage was restricted to policy and issues. Despite the tumultuous marital lives of John Kennedy and Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, newspapers instead focused on the more pressing national issues rather than the preseident's personal lives.
Obviously, these times have passed. Most of us came of age during Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal, and since then the political community has been more and more concerned with politician's personal lives instead of actual policy. In the 2000 presidential campaign, people made up their minds about whether they preferred Bush's perceived stupidity to Gore's supposed arogance and dorkiness. In 2004, the debate was initially focused on the war in Iraq, but soon veered back to Bush's verbal ineptness versus the possibility that John Kerry had exaggerated details of his tour in Vietnam. Even when there is not an election imminent, the political airwaves are filled with polemics and invective directed towards the personal lives of the people involved rather than the issues. Furthermore, the issues that we do concern ourselves with are more and more frequently issues of sexual privacy. Basically, we've gotten pretty frickin' nosey.
There are two points I want to make in this discussion:
1. The danger of voting for character rather than substance,
and,
2. The rise of tabloid politics, its implications, and how to beat it.
And here they are:
1. The cult of personality
When asked in 2000, a majority of Americans responded that they would prefer to have a beer with George W. Bush instead of Al Gore. A big deal was made out of this "likability" factor, and would be again in 2004. This phenomenon was not unusual--Reagan and Clinton were also both seen as very "likable" people. You still see political bumper stickers saying things like "Character will out" and other cliches trumpeting the personality of the politician that they celebrate. Americans seem to frequently vote according to their perception of the candidate's character, on their gut feeling about what a (wo)man s/he is. This is dumb for several reasons.
The first reason why you should not pass judgement on politicians based on their personality: you actually have no idea who these people are. It can be impossible to see through the carefully practiced, focus group-tested personalities they put on. Good politicians are skilled actors who practice delivering lines and sincere expressions in private and receive hours on end of coaching. The senator that you think is a honest, plainspoken man of the people is just as likely to simply be the guy who plays the best honest, plainspoken man of the people. Consider Ed Norton. I like Ed Norton. He is a great actor, and takes on roles in movies I usually enjoy. Have I ever seen Ed Norton interviewed? No. Do I have any idea what he is like as a person? No. Is it irrational that I like him? Yes. By this same token, it is irrational for me to like Barack Obama simply because I read his book, shook his hand, and generally admire his personality and back story. I should make up my mind on him based on his policy instead.
"Going with your gut" is a celebrated method of making a political decision in our culture-and a stupid one. It is a poor substitue for actually doing the work to research and understand the issues. Not only does it smack of apathy and intellectual laziness, but it is dangerous. History has proved over and over again that the door to fascism is always opened by a likable, charismatic leader who inspires confidence and trust. The examples are so overused that they've become cliched (Hitler, Castro, Stalin, etc), but they are ignored nonetheless. Perhaps it speaks to a major human flaw of misplacing trust in "likability."
It is not safe to vote for the person you like more; you have to do the research and pick the person whose ideals you most identify with. Even this is not enough: it's just as important to keep track of them after the fact to make sure that they live up to their promises. If even 1% more of the population were to shoulder their civic responsibility in this way, the world would be a better place.
2. Entertainment Tonight: Washington
Personal politics are everywhere. You've heard all about McCain, Giuliani, Kerry, and Gingrich's ex-wives, Edwards' hair, Obama's middle name and elementary school, et cetra ad infinitum. For example, a Google News search reveals that there were 1,340 articles written in the last month with the words "Mitt Romney" and "Mormon", but only 821 on Romney and the economy, 984 on Romney and immigration, 350 on Romney and welfare. Why is it more important that we know about the man's religion than his views on thsee other issues? 1,732 articles on Bill's influence in Hillary's campaign, compared to just 872 on Hillary and the environment?
By now, if your candidate has any shot in the general election, you have to put some money into smearing the other guy. "Opposition researchers" dig around in their history, then take everything unpaid parking ticket they can find and pay clandestine third parties to post that information all over the airwaves. Suddenly, George Bush's DUI or Al Gore's energy bill are on the lips of every 11 o'clock anchor rather than the infinitely less-exciting and more-important medicair that went before the senate that day.
While it's easy to blame the media for their sensationlist political coverage--and I frequently do--the fact of the matter is it's just as much our fault. Media outlets are businesses which must cater to their audience in order to make money, and I guarantee that if no one was interested in the personal foibles of our politicians these new outlets would not cover them. However, in the world of multi-billion dollar industries based on Brad Pitt's marital life, the media rightly recognizes that they can boost their viewership by covering that sort of stuff. Admit it: while you may condemn the personal politics conducted by the bad guys, you get a little schadenfreude every time one of them is involved in a scandal.
Every time you buy one of the trashy magazine in the check-out aisle of the Stop and Shop, every time linger on a celebrity gossip story as you channel surf, you are voting for more tabloid political coverage. Most of the money generated by television and print periodicals comes from advertising, and so the more attention you pay to a particular media, the more ad revenue they generate, and the more that network/periodical will carry the material you were watching.
It's a nice idea that the media should have the scruples to provide us with the information neccesary to make well-informed political decision, but the fact of the matter is that they are money-making endeavours, and must therefore be expected to make deciscions based upon their financial outcome. If everyone in the country got together and secretly decided to watch a lot of bass fishing, you can bet there'll be a whole lot more coverage of bassing (yup, I verbed it) on the daily news. Similarly, if the American public were to become more educated and pay proportionately more attention to political issues instead of the candidate's personal lives, news outlets would quickly revert to pre-Lewinsky news coverage.
Where I stop whining and start doing something: My pledge
I will not provide coverage or commentary on any personal politics on this blog. I will not click on any online news stories that deal with news about a politician's personal life. I will change the channel rather than watching it, I will not buy a magazine or newspaper with such a story on its cover.
So, there my vote: no more assasination politics.
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Friday, March 2, 2007
Sex, drugs, and vital news (in that order)
This month in the news
Here are some of the most active news subjects over the last month to break over the last month or so:
1. Anna Nicole Smith: died; trial ensues over where she will be buried
2. Astronaut drama: NASA love triangle leads to kidnapping plot
3. Iraq: more bombings; Iran possibly supplying weapons; British begin withdrawl
4. Global Warming: international panel says warming "unequivocably" caused by humans
5. Presidential race: McCain & Obama announce; sharp words exchanged between the Clinton and Obama camps.
To demonstate how popular these stories are, I did a google news search to see how many stories were published on each in the U.S. last week. Here are the results, in order from most to least:
1. Iraq: 157,323
2. Anna Nicole Smith: 20,178 articles (1,000 within the last 15 hours).
3. Global warming: 19,088
4. Presidential race: 17,567
5. Astronaut story: 4,671
Other factors
Some additional factors should be noted when considering these features:
-Global warming got a boost this week with Inconvenient Truth winning a few Oscars and the subsequent attack on Al Gore's power consumption; also from new UN Secretary General stressing the urgency of action
-The astronaut story is now more than a few weeks older than Anna Nicole's story.
-This was a medium-to-low intensity week in Iraq, with action in Afghanistan likely drawing some attention away.
Why I find this significant
The reason why I find this significant is the potential consequences that each of these events have for the reader and world in the future. Here is that analysis:
Possible Consequences
1. Iraq: war has killed hundreds of thousands. More will likely die in the future, country flirts with civil war, hundreds of thousands of US troops possibly to be withdrawn.
2. Anna Nicole Smith: no discernable impact on anyone besides few friends and family members (excludes emotional impact)
3. Global warming: Sea levels possibly rise to displace hundreds of millions of people, drinking water and food supply problems cause famine among billions, temperature and disease changes affect millions, weather events continue to wreak havoc, trillions of dollars lost, Earth becomes unsustainable to humans.
4. Presidential Race: Next presidential electee makes executive decisions that have some economic and social effects on Americans
5. Astronaut scandal: no discernable impact on anyone except the few involved.
My point
You probably understand my point by now, but here it is directly: why is it that we, as news readers, are more interested by the death of an infamous celebrity than the possibility of global catastrophe and a threat to human existence?
This is more or less a rhetorical question. I'm pretty sure that the answer is that we're drawn to things that are dramatic and immediate, and bored by things that are large, slow moving, and subtle. Global warming isn't nearly as imminently threatening as a terrorist attack, and it is not a human entity that we can demonize and worry about. It is big and ubiquitous instead of localized; it is not as easy to understand and fear. Simply: it isn't sexy, so we don't pay it attention.
In the grand scheme of things, global warming is huge and Anna Nicole is invisible. If you were to draw a timeline of the human race on a paper, the period during which we've been able to live in comfort and travel quickly through harnessing chemical energy would be represented by a microscopic tic smaller than the breadth of a hair. We've been in control of the world for a fraction of a fraction of our existence, and we've already brought it perilously close to the edge. It's the equivalent of a 16-year-old being handed the keys for the first time, and totaling the car on a tree in the driveway. Or crashing through the closed garage door. Stepping back and looking at the human race as a whole, I believe that global warming will be the most important event in history, and the fastest. It will have taken far less time than it took us to master fire, the wheel, agriculture. No other major event in human history will have happened so quickly, or have had as big of an effect.
Now that I have expatiated a while, lets return to the media.
Here is my question:
Does the media have any obligation to hold us in perspective on these issues, or can they only be expected to be concerned with making a profit, as every other business is?
I seriously cannot answer that question, but perhaps it would be instructive to observe how the media has covered these two events to get a sense of whether they believe that they have such an obligation:
How the different major outlets compare
Here's a comparion of some major online news outlets. I'm ranking them based on Global Warming articles per Anna Nicole Smith article:
_________________ANS ____ GW ______ GW/ANS
CNN_______________51 ____ 34 ________ .67
Fox News_________154_____ 126 _______ .83
Washington Post____134 ____ 230 _______ 1.72
BBC________________7 ____ 136 _______ 19.4
New York Times______2 ____ 169 _______ 84.5
My analysis
CNN and Fox are in a ratings war, and hoping to eat eachother's lunch, so their ratio is pretty close to one another. They're both shooting for the lowest-common-denominator news watcher, someone who is not neccesarily reading the news for any specific reason, just scanning it to catch up. These are the people who are the most likely to have their eye caught by an Anna Nicole Smith article and click on it.
BBC and NY Times are catered towards a more educated audience, who are apparantly more sensitive to global warming issues and less inclined to be interested in Anna Nicole Smith. I'm impressed that the NYT ran even less articles on Anna Nicole than the BBC, whose readers would theoretically care even less as they live an ocean away.
The Washington Post is a little anomalous. It ran the most total articles on the subjects combined. It would seem that the Post is interested in picking up online gossip readship. Why the Post and not the Times is angling for that audience is beyond me.
Here are some of the most active news subjects over the last month to break over the last month or so:
1. Anna Nicole Smith: died; trial ensues over where she will be buried
2. Astronaut drama: NASA love triangle leads to kidnapping plot
3. Iraq: more bombings; Iran possibly supplying weapons; British begin withdrawl
4. Global Warming: international panel says warming "unequivocably" caused by humans
5. Presidential race: McCain & Obama announce; sharp words exchanged between the Clinton and Obama camps.
To demonstate how popular these stories are, I did a google news search to see how many stories were published on each in the U.S. last week. Here are the results, in order from most to least:
1. Iraq: 157,323
2. Anna Nicole Smith: 20,178 articles (1,000 within the last 15 hours).
3. Global warming: 19,088
4. Presidential race: 17,567
5. Astronaut story: 4,671
Other factors
Some additional factors should be noted when considering these features:
-Global warming got a boost this week with Inconvenient Truth winning a few Oscars and the subsequent attack on Al Gore's power consumption; also from new UN Secretary General stressing the urgency of action
-The astronaut story is now more than a few weeks older than Anna Nicole's story.
-This was a medium-to-low intensity week in Iraq, with action in Afghanistan likely drawing some attention away.
Why I find this significant
The reason why I find this significant is the potential consequences that each of these events have for the reader and world in the future. Here is that analysis:
Possible Consequences
1. Iraq: war has killed hundreds of thousands. More will likely die in the future, country flirts with civil war, hundreds of thousands of US troops possibly to be withdrawn.
2. Anna Nicole Smith: no discernable impact on anyone besides few friends and family members (excludes emotional impact)
3. Global warming: Sea levels possibly rise to displace hundreds of millions of people, drinking water and food supply problems cause famine among billions, temperature and disease changes affect millions, weather events continue to wreak havoc, trillions of dollars lost, Earth becomes unsustainable to humans.
4. Presidential Race: Next presidential electee makes executive decisions that have some economic and social effects on Americans
5. Astronaut scandal: no discernable impact on anyone except the few involved.
My point
You probably understand my point by now, but here it is directly: why is it that we, as news readers, are more interested by the death of an infamous celebrity than the possibility of global catastrophe and a threat to human existence?
This is more or less a rhetorical question. I'm pretty sure that the answer is that we're drawn to things that are dramatic and immediate, and bored by things that are large, slow moving, and subtle. Global warming isn't nearly as imminently threatening as a terrorist attack, and it is not a human entity that we can demonize and worry about. It is big and ubiquitous instead of localized; it is not as easy to understand and fear. Simply: it isn't sexy, so we don't pay it attention.
In the grand scheme of things, global warming is huge and Anna Nicole is invisible. If you were to draw a timeline of the human race on a paper, the period during which we've been able to live in comfort and travel quickly through harnessing chemical energy would be represented by a microscopic tic smaller than the breadth of a hair. We've been in control of the world for a fraction of a fraction of our existence, and we've already brought it perilously close to the edge. It's the equivalent of a 16-year-old being handed the keys for the first time, and totaling the car on a tree in the driveway. Or crashing through the closed garage door. Stepping back and looking at the human race as a whole, I believe that global warming will be the most important event in history, and the fastest. It will have taken far less time than it took us to master fire, the wheel, agriculture. No other major event in human history will have happened so quickly, or have had as big of an effect.
Now that I have expatiated a while, lets return to the media.
Here is my question:
Does the media have any obligation to hold us in perspective on these issues, or can they only be expected to be concerned with making a profit, as every other business is?
I seriously cannot answer that question, but perhaps it would be instructive to observe how the media has covered these two events to get a sense of whether they believe that they have such an obligation:
How the different major outlets compare
Here's a comparion of some major online news outlets. I'm ranking them based on Global Warming articles per Anna Nicole Smith article:
_________________ANS ____ GW ______ GW/ANS
CNN_______________51 ____ 34 ________ .67
Fox News_________154_____ 126 _______ .83
Washington Post____134 ____ 230 _______ 1.72
BBC________________7 ____ 136 _______ 19.4
New York Times______2 ____ 169 _______ 84.5
My analysis
CNN and Fox are in a ratings war, and hoping to eat eachother's lunch, so their ratio is pretty close to one another. They're both shooting for the lowest-common-denominator news watcher, someone who is not neccesarily reading the news for any specific reason, just scanning it to catch up. These are the people who are the most likely to have their eye caught by an Anna Nicole Smith article and click on it.
BBC and NY Times are catered towards a more educated audience, who are apparantly more sensitive to global warming issues and less inclined to be interested in Anna Nicole Smith. I'm impressed that the NYT ran even less articles on Anna Nicole than the BBC, whose readers would theoretically care even less as they live an ocean away.
The Washington Post is a little anomalous. It ran the most total articles on the subjects combined. It would seem that the Post is interested in picking up online gossip readship. Why the Post and not the Times is angling for that audience is beyond me.
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