Why We Don't Know Shit (An Ongoing Series)
This study pretty much sums up our problems as a country and why our democracy is broken. The Project for Excellence in Journalism studied 2008 campaign coverage and discovered this about the topics of campaign stories:
Political Topics 63.4%
Personal Topics 17.3%
Domestic Policy 7.2%
Foreign Policy 7.5%
Public Record 1.4%
Electorate 1.1%
Misc. 2.0%
So most of the coverage so far, almost 2/3 of it, has been about who is winning and who is losing. Given a different person has won or lost at every stop so far (heck, let's even give Mitt his Gold Medal in Wyoming), that means there's plenty of horse race to talk about. Especially when the media keeps getting it wrong.
But if you want learn something about a candidate's positions from the news, good luck.
We're going to need it.
Political Topics 63.4%
Personal Topics 17.3%
Domestic Policy 7.2%
Foreign Policy 7.5%
Public Record 1.4%
Electorate 1.1%
Misc. 2.0%
So most of the coverage so far, almost 2/3 of it, has been about who is winning and who is losing. Given a different person has won or lost at every stop so far (heck, let's even give Mitt his Gold Medal in Wyoming), that means there's plenty of horse race to talk about. Especially when the media keeps getting it wrong.
But if you want learn something about a candidate's positions from the news, good luck.
We're going to need it.
Labels: what a mess the U.S. press
posted by George at 1:00 PM
2 Comments:
My favorite was from a couple months back in the SF Chronicle, where they printed a wire survey that said people would rather hear about candidates' positions on key issues than campaign strategy. . .
. . . and then packaged it with two stories on campaign strategy.
Brilliant.
The coverage has been making me sick. How can the press claim victory when the delegate count is 9 to 9? They're shaping, not reporting. Even NPR is bugging me.
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