On politics and media, and why we might be the problem

Although I’d like to believe that I’m not the kind of person who commentates on the mainstream media, living at home and not working has enabled me to not only easily receive a lot of my news from mainstream TV, but to have the luxury of thinking about how it’s delivered. I’ve come to rely on CNN for its round-the-clock coverage of news stories, no matter how undeserving of coverage they might be, and I take a perverse pleasure in sitting on my couch fuming about how poor I find their reporting.

I get that people like politics. It’s exciting, divisive, competitive, and there’s nothing quite like assigning the blame to the other party. But the media’s reliance on this back and forth between Republicans and Democrats as the only way to frame a news story is a disservice to both its viewership and its own reputation.

Since the launch of the Obamacare website, the bulk of the mainstream news coverage has been on not the merits of the law, including both its successes and shortcomings, but the political impact that the various glitches of the website have had. Whether this is because CNN doesn’t have anyone on their commentary panels that’s a healthcare expert, or because they believe the law is too confusing for their viewers to understand, it’s incredibly frustrating to hear the same rounds of “How will this affect the 2014 Midterm elections?” as the lead in for Obamacare stories. Why don’t we hear about how the law is affecting millions of Americans, good and bad? The main focus for an entire week was that the President’s earlier statement about who could keep their health insurance ended up not being true. However, the focus wasn’t on why people couldn’t keep their insurance, only that the President originally said they could and now they couldn’t. People have been viewing it as a reflection on the President’s credibility — it is, but that’s not the only story. At this point, the President’s credibility only matters in that it would help him win an election. He doesn’t have any more of those, so why does it matter?

Because the media can spin a story based on it. It’s this endless cycle that keeps us in the media’s grip. They only report on things in as much as it gives them a story either six minutes or six months down the road. This isn’t a new characteristic of the industry — it’s always been the case. It’s a business and it needs viewers to continue. So then the problem must be with the viewers. Are people actually interested in things only as CNN presents them?

It certainly feels like the general public’s perception of issues is in scope with the methods that CNN uses to present them. Although unscientific, it’s difficult not to glean a lot of information from Jimmy Kimmel’s experiment of asking people on the street whether they preferred the Affordable Care Act to Obamacare, and displaying the results. Many of the big political issues like Obamacare are very dense and unless a person has studied healthcare policy and economics, they’ll find it difficult to make a reasoned argument for or against the merits of the law. What they’ll instead stand for are the base opinions or values that they themselves hold, or that they’ve been told about by one of the political pundits on CNN. The media knows this, and doesn’t bother seriously studying the issues. It looks at the issues in the same depth that a person understands it.

A example of this approach can be seen in how Governor Chris Christie is mentioned in the media. The focus is more on how Christie is viewed and whether he is seen as pragmatic by voters and Americans, and almost not at all on his policies, his actions, or most importantly his record as Governor. This is in part due to Christie’s ability to make bold and controversial statements that steal the focus from anything that he is doing as governor. He must have found this out early in his career, and has been exploiting it ever since to make a name and image for himself, and not tied down to any ideology that could be attacked by his opponents. The media has gone along with this, as Christie is much more interesting to view in sound bites than in studying the effect his policies have had on poor New Jerseyans, or the state’s schools.

Perhaps the best way to combat these deficiencies of our media is for us to educate those around us as to the issues. This doesn’t mean to convince them of one policy against another, but rather to ensure that the actual policies themselves are studied. This is the only way to ensure that we can clearly see the impact that policies have on us, instead of being distracted by the politics.