Techfun

The 2008 Presidential election will be one year from this week. To commemorate this, Tiffany and Alan have suggested blogging about the obstacles in the way of electing a good candidate for president. The suggested topic is exceptionally broad so I am going to narrow my focus down to the obstacles that individual voters face in trying to select the best candidate.  More of these posts can be found in the The Biggest Obstacle To Electing The Right Presidential Candidate thread on BlogCatalog.com.

The biggest problem I see is that voters have willingly surrendered the framing of the campaign issues to the candidates and the news media. We accept the fact that the news media treats presidential candidates like any other celebrities instead of treating them like the job applicants they really are. The run up to the election should be like a job interview. It should be the voters who decide what questions are asked of our candidates. The huge amount of hype surrounding the YouTube.com based Democratic debate tells us how unusual it is in this day and age for real citizens to play a role in framing the campaign debates. However, even that was filtered through the news media because CNN’s politics team selected the questions to be asked.

Candidates as celebrities adds a huge layer of fog to the campaign cycle. When a Google News search finds 90 articles mentioning John Edward’s and haircut and only 62 articles mention his position on gay marriage, you can see that something is seriously wrong with the way the news media handles coverage of the election and the candidates. I really wish I could blame this on the news media, but I can’t.

With the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980’s coverage of politics and elections lost its special status and became just another product for news rooms that are under increasing pressure to act as profit centers for the corporations that own the networks and newspapers. With profit as the goal, the news media will cover the stories that will attract eyeballs. If CNN knows that they can get a spike in viewers by spending an hour on Britney Spears’ legal and custody woes and that in depth coverage of the details surrounding Barack Obama’s position on education will result in people switching to another channel, the choice is perfectly clear from CNN’s perspective.

News departments of major networks, and dedicated news networks in particular MUST cover politics to maintain their credentials as a "news" outlet. Under the Fairness Doctrine that meant airing coverage of all candidates in an even and unbiased manner. Now that they no longer have that constraint, they can cover the election in any way they see fit. They have seen that American’s suck up gossip and ignore drier policy coverage so thats how they structure their political coverage. Even the New York times is featuring two big stories on their political page today that focus almost exclusively on Hillary Clinton’s gender instead of her positions on issues.

As long as voters who are also consumers of mainstream news outlets are willing to settle for gossip and conversation about the candidates personal lives instead of their policy positions, nothing much will change and the election will remain more like the selection of a Prom King or Queen than the sober selection of someone to elevate to the position of a major world leader.