“Donald Trump’s Republican lead is only 7 points smaller than Hillary Clinton’s Democratic one”
After reading the mind numbingly inane headline above I was struck by a notion with which I’ve long wrestled, namely that daily intake of commercial media political analysis can make one dumber. As a poli sci prof, I kinda have to pay close attention to do my day job, but I can’t help feeling like one of a few sober folks at a bar full of drunks. Folks who want to test their level of knowledge and understanding of American politics need only peruse the headlines at realclearpolitics.com on any given day. If you don’t feel like laughing, crying, or scratching your head after reading at least 40% of these headlines, then you have some homework to do.
The first sentence of the article connected to the absurd headline above concisely illustrates the folly of present news media coverage of 2016 electoral politics.
“What a world, in which the tightening Democratic race is the big news from a national 2016 poll, and the continued lead of Donald Trump among Republicans is the ho-hum, who-cares storyline.”
Neither of the assertions in this opening sentence are true outside of the media bubble. In the real world at present there really isn’t a competitive race for either party’s nomination yet. Trump’s “lead” absolutely should be a “ho-hum, who-cares storyline,” but sadly it continues to be taken seriously by ostensibly serious journalists whose reliance on polling data is like a high school social studies teacher relying on “Schoolhouse Rock” videos to pass the time until the bell rings. Info-tainment may well make edu-tainment look edifying by comparison at this point. Hats off to the Huffington Post, whose decision to relegate Trump news to its entertainment news section should earn them some kind of award for journalistic integrity.
The polls being reported in the media are polls produced for media consumption. They are manufacturing news, not reporting it. Even if we forget the considerable methodological problems of early horse race polls for a second, it is clear that respondents to polls this far from an election have not yet considered their candidate preferences in context. When the actual 2016 electorate actually tunes in to the 2016 race for president, candidate preferences will be based much more on the voters’ interests and values, not on their largely abstract cynicism about politics in general. At this point, the “race” is just an elaborate pre-game show. Candidate-preferences have no discernable consequences yet. Protest candidates are more fun and more interesting. When voter attention turns to actual policy preferences moonbat and wingnut candidates alike will be pushed aside. The real story would be if average voters really were homing in on the serious, viable candidates this far from the election. There simply isn’t any rational incentive for average voters to be paying serious attention to 2016 politics yet.
What’s happening is that protest candidates, like Trump and Sanders, can generate media buzz in the present mass communications environment. It’s much easier for protest candidates with sufficient resources, standing, or both, to garner national attention in the age of social media, when the commercial news media industry is hyper-competitive and dominated by niche markets. Trump and Sanders are ratings rainmakers for commercial news media outlets, and info-taining space/time fillers for political journalists who have to really hustle to avoid becoming seasonal employees in the present media industry environment.
At the end of the day for national commercial media outlets, Trump is pure ratings gold and Sanders (along with other over-hyped potential rivals and manufactured HRC “news”) are entertaining and useful time/space fillers until Hillary Clinton begins to campaign more vigorously, which will happen when doing so will actually matter.