I think political junkies are prone to worrying too much about what goes on on cable news. In relative terms, the audience for cable news is pretty low. What does and does not get covered on CNN or FOX or MSNBC really isn’t too likely to change the outcome of the upcoming midterm elections. But they do serve at least one pretty important function, which is to serve as public notifications that elections are upcoming and imminent. When those cable news channels, and to a degree, the networks, too, spend most of their airtime covering non-election news, fewer people realize that it’s time to pay attention and go vote.
Pollsters are beginning to predict record low turnout based on how much interest in the elections their respondents are reporting. If they’re right, there are many causes for it. Most responsible, in my opinion, is that Congress hasn’t been doing anything for months and this is the least productive Congress in modern history. They’ve taken themselves out of the news, which has taken Congress out of the public consciousness.
For the purposes of inspiring turnout, it would be better to do things that make the public angry than to do nothing at all. And, no, making the public angry by doing nothing at all won’t work as well.
Still, the news networks have some kind of civic responsibility to cover the elections, and I don’t think they’ve been doing an adequate job of it. This isn’t the primary reason that interest in the elections is low, but it’s a significant contributing factor.
On what grounds any longer do news networks have that sort of responsibility?
There hasn’t been an economic, political, or cultural incentive for a network to have civic responsibility in 25 years. And most have been awful for well over a decade.
The hyping of ISIS and ebola in all media, not just TV, has eclipsed an election that was heading for airing of issues like raising the minimum wage and, thanks to Sen. Begich, raising Social Security benefits. In doing so the fact that there is an election has been eclipsed as well.
And then there are changes in openness to people polling or people canvassing. It would be interesting to know how many no-answers pollsters get this year compared to previous years. More extensive use of call screening and less enthusiasm about pollsters in general (compared to the 1960s and 1970s) makes it easier for people to not respond.
It was the GOP that took the vacation. From their perspective, it was a smart move to create low voter turnout.
What work in the field has been done has been by outside groups and certain of the candidates themselves. To much consultant strategizing and consultant messaging, along with a deathly fear of anything that is not scripted, has made the candidate silent and drab.
If a protest happens in the Middlewest South…
As Melissa Perry Harris, a panelist today at FergusonOctober,reminded the protestors that the Selma protests lasted 381 days!
#fergusonoctober
I guarantee that every voter in my Legislative District knows about the upcoming election. We made certain of it.
I have this ongoing fantasy of what things would be like today if Congresses from 1981 on had been more do nothings and more obstructionist wrt administrations’ wants. Had spent their time studying issues in depth and if it were found that real corrective action for a fundamental problem was required, to do the minimal and continuing monitoring to determine if that had worked or wasn’t enough or good enough. Had elevated the findings of the Pike and Church committees and assigned themselves the responsibility to see that such abuses weren’t repeated. And stopped coddling the CIA and NSA.
So much really bad legislation that created new and bigger problems could have been avoided (such as the S&L debacle). Beefing up the military for enemies that didn’t exist. Screwing up the progressive tax system. Social Security reform that created a big pot of cash without defining how that cash could be used for collective improvement in the short term and easily repaid over the years for when the bill its intended purpose came due. That’s merely big stuff from Reagan’s first term and we’ve had thirty more years of similar, bad governance.
In my opinion, the most responsible cause is just how distasteful politics has become and the feeling that nothing is going to change. I vaguely remember a distant campaign about Hope and Change.
I now live in Arkansas, and almost all of the Republican political ads are manipulative and misleading and their primary message is anti-Obama.
There are a few bright spots from Mark Pryor where he defends the Affordable Care Act, but it seems the Democrats have given up trying to discredit the Koch-Crossroads-NRA smear campaigns.
I wish someone would develop a set of ads that lift up the accomplishments of Obama and close by asking, “Why are the Republicans so afraid of Obama’s successes?”