In March of this year, National Public Radio (NPR) revealed that by the end of 2008, 23.6 million people were tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR’s ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they’ve managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.

Compared to cable news, where most networks are shedding viewers, and newspapers, where circulation continues to plummet, NPR is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.

But what is NPR doing differently that’s causing their listener numbers to swell? They basically have a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape where traditional methods of consumption (TV, radio, print) could be greatly marginalized in favor of digital distribution.

via Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media.

Project Censored

Junk Food News are the most frivolous unimportant news stories from March 2008-to March 2009 covered by the corporate media.

Vote on your top 5 choices by e-mailing your list to censored2009@gmail.com

• Jessica Simpson gains weight
• Tony Romo cheats on Jessica Simpson
• Jennifer Aniston’s on again off again relationship with John Mayor
• Michael Phelps hits a bong
• Miley Cyrus is racist
• Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair scandal pics
• Chris Brown hits Rhianna
• “Obama Girl”
• Brangelina twins
• Britney Spears makes a comeback
• Madonna gets divorced
• Josh Brolin’s bar brawl
• Twilight star Kristen Stewart photographed smoking pot
• Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt get “married”
• Heather Locklear’s troubles
• Andy Dick charged with sexual battery
• Shia Labeauf crashes car under the influence
• Anne Hathaway’s boyfriend charged with wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy
• Jamie Lynn Spears gives birth
• Nikki Blonsky of “Hairspray” vs. Bianca Golden of “America’s Next Top Model”
• Barenaked Ladies’ Steven Page arrested for cocaine possession
• Lindsay Lohan is dating a woman
• Amy Winehouse in and out of rehab
• Christian Bale’s obscene rant
• Ellen Degeneres weds Portia de Rossi
• Verne Troyer’s sex tape
• Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon elope
• Montauk Monster
• Clay Aiken is homosexual/has a kid
• Patrick Swayze has cancer
• Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz get married/have a kid
• Scarlett Johanson and Ryan Reynolds secret marriage
• Dog Cloned
• Actor/Rapper Joaquin Phoenix mystifies David Letterman
• Barry Bonds uses Steroids
• Vanessa Hudgen’s naked pics
• Alex Rodriguez on Steroids
• Lives of TomKat and Suri Cruise
• Obama’s blackberry obsession
• The First Puppy
• Michelle Obama fashion sense
• High School Pregnancy pact in MA high school
• Sarah Palin Post election (interview in front of a turkey being killed)
• CNN uses a hologram in their election night coverage
• Lipstick on a Pig line

via Here is a list of possible “Junk Food” stories for this year’s chapter 3.

TV Turnoff Week

I have always had a serious problem with people relying on television as their primary source for news and other information.  The world is too complex to summarize in a few minutes during a news lineup, especially when equal amounts of coverage are given to news about the funding of children’s healthcare programs and an athlete’s admission that he used performance enhancing drugs.

This is one of the reasons I have made an effort to participate in TV Turnoff Week every year. (This year it is two weeks: April 20th – 26th and September 20th – 26th.)

While TV news coverage is probably adequate when covering things like ARod’s drug use, or Britney Spears child custody problems, it is extremely ill suited to handling complex issues like the legislature or the economy.  It is easy for a TV news cast to tell you how many jobs General Motors has eliminated but its not as easy to educate the viewer about the interplay between GM shareholders, management, lenders, and labor unions that went into the decision to cut jobs.

The e-mail I posted about yesterday claimed that 54% of Americans do not believe the economic stimulus package that passed the Senate today will be good for the nation.  What I want to know is where those people get their news and if that news source helped them build a solid “knowledge foundation” upon which to examine the package.  After seeing the results of this research by the National Center for Business Journalism I am inclined to believe that the answer to that question is a firm “No”.

The research, released today and completed at the close of 2008, is based on 450 interviews with heads of household throughout the United States who participate in financial decisions and whose household income totals $50,000 or more.

Television is cited as the primary source of news about the economy by more Americans than daily newspapers, the Internet and radio combined. In addition, more than half of those who primarily receive their economic news from television rate the coverage as good. It fails to answer the question “Good compared to what?”  Water cooler talk?  E-mails from the ConservativeAlertSystem? Rush Limbaugh?

The breakdown of respondents primary sources for economic news breaks down as:

• 48% – Television
• 21% – Newspapers
• 16% – Internet
• 8% – Radio
• 7% – Other

Of those who specified television, 56 percent said the coverage was good, 6 percent said excellent, 30 percent only fair, 5 percent poor and 3 percent “not sure.”

Six in ten of the respondents said they have made financial decisions based on economic news received from media sources.

Other findings:

• News of the financial crisis and federal bailout topped the list of most memorable financial stories of 2008 by a wide margin, followed by the housing market collapse and subprime mortgage scandal.
• Cited as the most important business coverage was the effect of oil prices, followed by the value of the dollar and reports about companies and jobs.

“The drastic nature of recent economic and financial news has Americans constantly looking for immediate information about where things may be headed. Our research indicates they make family financial decisions based on that information, which underscores the need for accurate, quality reporting on the economy.”

–Andrew Leckey, President of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism

For the complete report, including the opinions of respondents comparing the news networks, visit www.businessjournalism.org.

Shawn Otto here.  Two weeks ago today, America woke up to a new era.  Before the election, I said we’d report to you on the successes and failures of this initiative that we have built together.  This has, for me, become a very personal mission, one that I have volunteered a good portion of my life to over the course of the last year.   Thank you for joining me and the SD08 team in that journey.

In the beginning…

Eleven months ago, six of us called for a presidential debate on science.  We put up a website, reached out to our contacts, wrote some opeds, and launched it in the blogosphere – and with your help, Science Debate 2008 arguably became the largest political initiative in the history of American science.  More than 39,000 individual scientists, engineers and concerned citizens joined together, along with nearly every major American science organization, the presidents of over 100 leading universities, 30 Nobel laureates, leaders of American industry, the editors of most American science publications,  leading congresspersons and many of the most brilliant minds working in science today.  All told, our initiative came to represent some 125 million Americans.

No news is not good news

By any measure, this many prominent individuals and organizations publicly calling for a presidential debate on science was news, and yet despite our pitching this story to hundreds of political reporters around the nation, not one political page in America reported on it in the early days.

We researched why this might be and discovered a structural problem in American news.  Editors don’t allow political reporters to cover science, and science reporters have no access to the political pages.  At a time when the majority of challenges facing the nation revolve around science, from innovation and the economy, to climate change and energy, to healthcare, the environment, and science education, there is virtually no one covering science policy in America.  This is being compounded by major news outlets closing their science sections.

You gotta have faith

This lack of news coverage has a feedback loop with the candidates, causing them to class science as a niche topic.   This became apparent when, armed with our supporters, we secured broadcast partners in PBS’s NOW and NOVA, and a venue partner in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, but the candidates declined to attend.  Instead, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton attended the “Compassion Forum” at Messiah College, where, among other things, they answered questions about science.  John McCain ignored both events.

While I was disappointed, I was not surprised.  The faith community has worked for decades to develop a political voice in the national dialogue.  Campaign advisors suggested to us that a science policy debate would require extensive preparation and be high risk for low return, as only a small segment of the population was interested.

We decided to test that assumption, so we partnered with Research!America to do a national poll, and found that in fact 85% of US adults said the presidential candidates should participate in a debate to discuss key policy problems facing the United States, such as health care, climate change, and energy, and how science can help tackle them.  These results held across party lines.   Contrary to the assumptions of the media and the candidates, the public is highly interested in science when it becomes science policy – how science will affect their lives.

The Top 14 Science Questions

So we decided to demystify the event.  Our supporters had submitted some 3,400 questions online.  I laid them out in a spreadsheet and categorized them by subject frequency, and we culled them into what we thought were the key questions you were interested in.  We then worked with our cosponsors, as well as SEforA and several other organizations, to turn them into The 14 Top Science Questions Facing America.

I then went back to the campaigns and essentially said “look, these poll results show Americans are very interested in seeing you debate, and here are the questions.  Virtually all of American science and academia is behind this.  You’ve at least got to answer these questions in writing, and we still think you should attend a nationally televised forum.  We live in a science-dominated world and these are many of the key questions facing the nation.  The American people deserve to know your positions on them.”

A new milestone in presidential politics

To their credit, both Barack Obama and John McCain responded.  While they still declined a televised forum, instead attending yet another forum on faith, they did answer us in writing, representing the first time the endorsed candidates for President have laid out such detailed science policies as a part of the campaign – a milestone that is critical as we move further into the science-dominated 21st Century.

How they differed

There were several marked differences in their answers, which have been widely covered, but the largest was a philosophical difference, which was reflected in the answers to several of the questions.  Obama favored doubling federal investment in the kinds of research that eventually produce new economies that business can exploit, while McCain favored deregulation and tax credits to stimulate corporations to make increased R & D investments themselves.  Both positions had their detractors.  Some argued that government cannot afford to spend more in tough times, while others said quarterly-driven corporations can’t afford to carry decade-long high-risk basic research projects on the books.

800 million media impressions and a top web site

Science Debate 2008-related stories subsequently appeared in almost every major paper in the nation, and in blogs, print media, radio, and television around the world.  All told, thanks to you, the Science Debate 2008 initiative eventually made over 800 million media impressions, and the web site rose into the top 1/4 of 1% of most visited sites on the internet.  Together with you, we are now widely credited with having elevated science in the national dialogue, which was our stated goal at the outset.

Science Debate 2008 in play in the campaigns

The answers played out in the race in other ways as well.  I’ll give you just a few brief examples.  Senator McCain’s answer to the embryonic stem cell question came into play a number of times – first when his wording appeared to pull back from his earlier support for embryonic stem cell research, a characterization both campaigns battled over in radio ads, and later when his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin, flatly contradicted his answer in an interview with James Dobson and was subsequently described as “going rogue.”   Senator Obama’s answer has been the basis of numerous stories since the election as stem cell advocates look forward to his lifting President Bush’s restrictions as one of his first official acts as president.  In another answer and follow up interview, Senator McCain claimed to have been responsible for the development of wi-fi and Blackberry-like devices, which caused a minor tempest.  Senator Obama assembled a first class science advisory team to answer the questions, and they went on to further refine them into the Obama campaign’s science policy.  They made news when 61 Nobel laureates (and eventually 15 more), led by Obama science advisory team leader Harold Varmus, signed a letter in support of his campaign; and the answers of both candidates to the questions of Science Debate 2008 served as the basis for a letter signed by 178 universities and organizations, urging the next president to appoint a science advisor by January 20 and elevate the post to cabinet-level.

No matter which candidate you supported, this debate of science issues is healthy for America.  Science Debate 2008 without question achieved its objective of reframing and elevating science in the American national dialogue, and I am proud to have been a part of it, along with you.

The road ahead

Looking forward, president-elect Obama has laid out ambitious science policy objectives that, if enacted, will go a long way toward reinvigorating America’s science, research, engineering, energy, innovation, health, education and environmental standing, along with creating a renewed economic foundation for growth.  But to enact anything the President needs the support of Congress, and Congress in turn needs the support of the American people.  This is an historic opportunity to renew America’s commitment to science at the federal level, but in a tight economy, science remains vulnerable as long as it is low in public and media awareness.  Now, more than ever, efforts that increase the visibility of the role of science policy are very important, and the voice of scientists is critical in that process.

Because of this, the Science Debate initiative is seeking funding to continue.  I have done this as a full time volunteer for the last year, but to sustain it we need paid staff and infrastructure, so now I am asking you to stand up with me for science.  This is your initiative, and together we need to continue our work with the American media to bring science policy more into the mainstream, we need to continue with cutting-edge conferences like Innovation 2008 that educate policymakers and the public, we need to continue to cross-promote as a netroots team, and we need to continue to advocate for public debates of science issues in political races.

Strategies for change

There is much work to be done to overcome decades of infrastructure that has been created to disseminate antiscience misinformation.  Where we see ourselves fitting in is at this same nexus of policy, science, the media and the public.  So in the off year, one of our areas of focus will be to work to make the media more aware of the critical, positive role science policy and their coverage of it plays in the future of the United States, and to develop strategies for them to be more successful at it.  If science is engaged with policy, the public is highly interested.  Another is to work with state-level debate organizations, build bridges, and educate them, so when the time comes in 2010 for congressional races, we have laid some groundwork for science debates, or at least for science to be a much larger part of the debates.  Finally, we need to continue to use leveraged strategies to make the general public more aware of these issues as policies are debated and bills pass through congress.

The key to the future is in your hand

But let’s be clear.  None of this happens without your support.  It is all in your hands.  Science Debate has proven to be an enormously successful approach.  You own a piece of this initiative and its success because you helped build it, promote it and fund it.  But you have to want it to continue.  If you’re like me, you have a stake in a science-literate America, because you know how important it is to the ongoing success of the United States, to the health of the planet, and to your future and your children’s future.  I’m largely in this for my son and the millions of kids like him, and because I think it’s the right thing to do.  How about you?  Will you make an ongoing monthly contribution to help us continue?

Together, we can bring a new dawn for science in America.

Thank you, as always, for your support.

-Shawn Otto
and the rest of the team
at ScienceDebate2008.com

The six founders of Science Debate 2008: Matthew Chapman, Austin Dacey, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Lawrence Krauss, Chris Mooney, and Shawn Lawrence Otto.  They were later joined by team members Darlene Cavalier and Erik Beeler.  Science Debate 2008′s database and email communication infrastructure is made possible with pro-bono support from The DataBank, which we gratefully acknowledge.

The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.

The changes at the Monitor will include enhancing the content on CSMonitor.com, starting weekly print and daily e-mail editions, and discontinuing the current daily print format.

The Christian Science Monitor has long made their headlines available through Feedburner at and thats how I usually find my way to their website.  With their focus shifting to a once weekly print version with daily website updates I think we will see even more of the great journalism the world has come to expect from the CSM.

Mary Trammel, editor in chief, reminds is that the vision for the CSM is “journalism that seeks to bless humanity, not injure, and that shines light on the world’s challenges in an effort to seek solutions”.  By adopting and embracing an expanded web presence, readers of the CSM can hope to see more stories on a wider range of topics since the underlying limitations of a print publication will be eliminated for most of the week.

They give you some historical context by noting with a (R) for Bush or (D) for Kerry who the newspaper endorsed in the 2004 Presidential election.

Currently on the list are 41 newspapers that endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 that now are endorsing Obama and 4 newspapers that endorsed John Kerry and are now endorsing John McCain.

Yesterday however, I ended up writing a very lengthy comment in response to Will Taft’s blog post Why Obama Might Be Our Next President over at Healthy Living For People and Planet Earth. The comment was so lengthy that Will, with my permission has posted the comment as a guest post.

I took a rather contrary and bearish position in regards to his main premise that the media is making the economy sound worse off than it is in order to stir up opposition to another Republican president. I took the position that the economy is actually in far worse shape than the mainstream media portrays it. The guest post turned out to be very pessimistic and doesn’t offer anything in the way of ideas for a solution or even a way to mitigate the worst of the problems.

I did, of course, make reference to my pet theory that the GOP wants to throw this election and my reasons for believing that.

If you’d like to read the post, it can be found at Is The Media Downplaying Economic Trouble?.

Tom Shales, in the Washington Post, gives a thorough and fair critique of what ABC’s Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos did wrong. Ignoring the aspects that were outside the moderator’s control such as timing and number of commercial breaks, there was still a lot to complain about.

One of Shale’s primary complaints – one in which I am whole hearted agreement – was the waste of almost an hour of the two hour debate rehashing the “controversies” that have already been beaten to death in the news media. Asking Senator Obama to once again address the “bitter” comment and his former pastor’s statements from the pulpit was a complete waste of the candidates time as well as the time devoted to the debate on the part of watchers who really want to hear from the candidates.

That hour was well summed up by Shale:

“It’s not the first time I made a misstatement that was mangled up, and it won’t be the last,” said Obama, with refreshing candor. But candor is dangerous in a national campaign, what with network newsniks waiting for mistakes or foul-ups like dogs panting for treats after performing a trick. The networks’ trick is covering an election with as little emphasis on issues as possible, then blaming everyone else for failing to focus on “the issues.”

Over at Gather.com, Samuel Gerace Sr. had more to say about the media after the debate than about the candidates.

The “debate” last night was very revealing, no not about the position of the candidates on the real issues which challenge the country today after the disastrous but the trustworthiness of the media’s objectives in the moderating the questions put to the candidates. Charlie and George were a veritable disgrace to the intelligence of any person wishing to see the candidate’s positions on a number of subjects which are hobbling our democracy. (emphasis added) For example a few of those fundamental issues are: ethics in the executive and legislative branches of government, a detailed plan to yes, regulate Wall Street’s insatiable hunger for greed and profit, changing the budgetary allocations so that education, health and economic needs are properly addressed, and finally a balanced budget amendment to collar deficit spending and mortgaging the future of the country to China, Saudi Arabia and Japan.

I know the debates are not drawing American Idol size viewing audiences, but to me that seems to indicate tha tthe networks handling the debates should focus more on the issues and less on the normal media circus surrounding the campaigns. We can get that everyday.

At least John McCain is burying his own campaign in appalling statements like the one he made recently when he essentially stated that he would, as president, hand over his Commander In Chief powers to Gen. Petraeus.

When asked whether he would divert U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan in order to quash the resurgent Taliban and capture Osama Bin Laden he responded with “I would not do that unless Gen. Petraeus said that he felt that the situation called for that.”

There are several things both wrong and a bit insane about that answer, not the least of which is that Gen. Petraeus himself has begged off making that kind of call in Senate hearings that McCain himself attended earlier this month recognizing that such decisions MUST come from higher up the chain of command.

Slate.com’s Fred Kaplan has a nice analysis of this foreign policy preview from Senator McCain in an article titled I Don’t Know. Go Ask Petraeus. McCain’s appalling answer to a question about national-security policy.

 
This famous table from a report by The Program on International Policy Attitudes made some headlines back in 2003 when it was released.  It found that news consumers who got most of their news from NPR and PBS sources were better informed and were FAR less likely to hold misperceptions about the world.  These misperceptions include:

• Saddam Hussein or Iraq was directly involved in September 11
• Saddam Hussein or Iraq gave al-Qaeda substantial support
• Weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq
• International popular opinion favored the U.S. war against Iraq.

 What was so interesting about the study is that political affiliation was not the deciding factor in the study subject’s awareness of the facts.  Both Republican and Democratic NPR/PBS viewers held fewer, if any, misperceptions when compared to people of their own political affiliation who favor commercial news sources for thieir coverage.  The full report is available as a PDF at PIPA’s site.

PIPA studies public opinion on international issues. PIPA is a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), University of Maryland.

PBS/NPR are a valuable investment for our tax money.

Tell Congress: Reject Bush’s Cuts to Public Broadcasting

This past week, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration has once again proposed deep cuts in federal funding for public broadcasting. Unfortunately the cuts proposed this year are even more severe than in past years — but with your help, we can convince Congress to restore this funding. 

If it seems like we go through this process every year, you’re not mistaken. For eight straight years, the President’s budget requests have attempted to cut or entirely eliminate funding for public broadcasting. For seven of those years, Congress has responded to massive public pressure and restored the funding. Let’s convince them to do it again.

This year’s proposed cuts are the deepest ever proposed by the administration. Even Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who currently serves as the President of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), has called these cuts "draconian." In addition to slashing current and future funding, this year’s proposal even tries to go back and withdraw funding already approved in previous years. 

Practically every day we hear a new story about media consolidation. More and more, the free press that is so essential to our democracy is owned and controlled by a smaller and smaller number of mega-corporations. Never has it been more essential to have a publicly funded, noncommercial media outlet that provides thoughtful rather than partisan news and doesn’t waste our time covering Britney Spears and the baseball steroids scandal. 

In his last year in office, don’t let Bush pull the plug on Bill Moyers, the NewsHour, Big Bird, and the Cookie Monster. Please read the petition below and then sign at right to tell Congress: fund public broadcasting.

The Center for Media and Democracy releases an end of year list of the "most heinous polluters of the information environment over the past year".  These are people who take spin and propaganda to all new lows.  These awards have been issued annually since 2004, and its now time to vote for the 2007 entries.

This years candidates are (in no particular order):

• Glowing Green – Nuclear Energy Institute with PR firm Hill & Knowlton  for the launch of the "Clean and Safe Energy Coalition" in April 2006 to promote the idea that building new nuclear reactors would help solve global warming.  They managed to keep the fact that was all funded by the trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), and headed by former Bush Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christine Todd Whitman and former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore, who left that group in 1986.  Whitman and Moore’s credentials were spun like mad to make them appear to be "environmentalists" who have seen the light and now support nuclear power.  The PR folks traded heavily on Moore’s involvement with Greenpeace over twenty years ago to punch up the message.
• War More Years – MoveOn.org and the new Democratic majority have not kept their promises on getting US troops out of Iraq.  In fact, MoveOn.org (Disclaimer: I generally support MoveOn.org and have donated money to them in the past) sent out a survey to its members when the first House spending bill on Iraq was under threat of veto to allow members a say in what position MoveOn should support.  MoveOn’s Eli Pariser described the survey in an email as an opportunity for members to participate in "a big decision coming up this week. … MoveOn is a member-directed organization — we believe that all of us, together, are smarter than any one of us." In fact, however, MoveOn’s survey was designed to conceal from its members the option of supporting the stronger anti-war amendment put forth by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
• Tricky Wiki – Virgil Griffith’s Wikiscanner opened up a big can of worms when it became clear that more than 180,000 organizations have made anonymous edits to Wikipedia articles, often in violation of Wikipedia’s well defined policies.  Perpetrators include the FBI, CIA, Britain’s Labour Party, the Vatican, Wal-Mart, the Republican and Democratic parties, the Church of Scientology, Dell Computers, Microsoft, Apple, the United Nations, and Diebold, the maker of electronic voting machines as well as several well known Public Relations firms.  

Past winners include:

• Gold Falsies Award of 2005 – The Video News Release Industry – In March, the New York Times reported, "At least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years. … Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgment of the government’s role."
• Golden Falsies Award of 2006 – The ABCs of History – The most false of Falsies goes to the American Broadcasting Corporation. ABC used the fifth anniversary of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as an opportunity to rewrite history, broadcasting "The Path to 9/11," a six-hour "docudrama" written and produced by conservative filmmakers. The made-for-TV blockbuster placed the lion’s share of the blame for the attacks on alleged failures of the Clinton administration.

Earlier this week I wrote about how political news is produced and consumed more like entertainment coverage and gossip than serious news.   I still stand behind that position but a few other posts have inspired me to write about another issue that Brian mentioned the other day and that was a theme in Tiffany’s entry.

Tiffany is right; despite such a low percentage of eligible citizens turning out at the polls, we have too many voters.  Wikipedia describes voting this way:  "Voting is a method of decision making wherein a group such as a meeting or an electorate attempts to gauge its opinion—usually as a final step following discussions or debates."   I like that definition better than most dictionary definitions that focus on the act of filling in a ballot or pulling a lever as voting.  There is so much more that must happen first.  Wikipedia’s inclusion of "usually as a final step following discussions or debates" is critical to understand what has gone wrong with the US electoral system.

We no longer have any real discussion or debate in our election system.   We have a surplus of single issue voters and that is the crux of the problem.  When you hear the term "the base" as in Republicans must get out the base to win this election you should mentally translate that the Republicans need to poke a stick at the sore spots that matter to their party members.  In 2004, the campaign ads claiming that a vote for Kerry meant a surrender in the "war on terror" had this effect.  

In November of 2004, eleven states had ballot measures where voters could vote for state constitutional amendments codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Getting Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah’s voters out to the polls based on these measures benefited Bush and the Republicans immensely.  Same-sex marriage, like abortion, or immigration, or gun control is an issue that will draw people out to vote who would have otherwise stayed home.  If we have any hope of salvaging our republic we, as voters, need to make a supreme act of will and stop letting campaigns and parties press our buttons.  

Yesterday, I did an informal poll among my co-workers to determine what single issue they would find most difficult to ignore in selecting a candidate.  The idea was to see what we could take off the table for, say twenty years while we tried to fix wider issues that are less emotional but affect more people.  The people I asked, three women, and one man, all between 25 and 35 years old, all settled on the Abortion controversy as a make or break issue for them.   For two of them, both women, it was an instant decision.  They decided that even if they agreed with a candidate’s position on most other issues, if they disagreed on this one issue, it would change their vote.

I came of voting age well after Roe v. Wade and all my voting life, the one thing I usually know about a candidate is their position on abortion – often that is all I knew.  As a life long Democrat, I’ve watched my party use the issue of abortion and the threat of changes to the Roe v. Wade world as a way to bring out voters.  I’ve seen the Republican do the same thing on the same issue, as well as on the issue of same-sex marriage, and immigration.

As  gay man, same-sex marriage laws actually affect me.  Brian and I traveled to Vermont in 2001 to have a civil ceremony.  It doesn’t mean anything legally here in Pennsylvania, but it was important to us.  Despite the fact that it matters a great deal to me.  I am going to make an effort to not let that issue overshadow other issues in my selection of a candidate.

If enough people did that, we could actually elect people who can address the issues that affect the nation as a whole instead of special voting blocks.  Divide and conquer has been a very successful tactic on the part of both the Republican and Democratic parties for at least as long as I have been able to vote and it only works with the cooperation of us voters.   I don’t believe that voters in the US have the desire or the will to look past the big hot button issues, but I can dream.

If we want politicians to set aside their differences and work together for the good of the nation, we voters need to set a good example for them.  If we want to make voting the end result of true discussions or debates on the issues we have to go into those discussions and debates before we have made our decisions based on a single issue.

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.