Against 24-Hour News:

I have decided that the advent of 24-hour news, rather than keep people informed, has done great damage to our political process. I have heard others say similar things from time to time and have adamantly disagreed. "24-hour news is great," I said. "I can turn the TV on at any time and find out what's happening with the war in Iraq or who's on top in the presidential race." I used to cite things like the 2000 presidential election as proof of why 24-hour news was so terrific. But now I think I was a total fool for ever falling in love with CNN and MSNBC.

Here's the deal. Even during a huge news event like the 2000 election or the beginning of the Iraq war, there is no need for 24-hour coverage all the time. Of course, the networks had to stay on all night on election night when the votes were being tallied and Gore, no Bush, no Gore... was winning. And of course we wanted to see the night sky over Baghdad as we attacked Iraq, but I can't think of any event that would call for more than a few days of nonstop coverage. (We all know that the following month after the election in 2000 we were subjected to watching Floridians staring at hanging chads for countless hours of riveting coverage.) When we're not experiencing some cataclysmic event, or even when we are, the networks need to fill time and that's when we get into trouble. Instead of creating thoughtful coverage, the anchors, who don't actually have the time to create thoughtful coverage, call in Joe Schmo Expert Someone Or Other and the coverage becomes thoughtless noise. (And that's the best case. What about all the people who were so psychologically scarred because they couldn't turn on a TV without seeing the World Trade Center collapsing for at least three months after Sept. 11.)

For a lack of anything better to do, CNN and MSNBC conduct multiple polls daily and then invite right wingers and left wingers and in-betweeners into the studios to comment on the poll numbers of the hour. Dean is shown to have a few percentage points less than Kerry and some asshole spends ten minutes talking about why this particular poll, Poll Number 5,263 of the election season, means that Dean's candidacy is doomed for certain. The next day, the same idiot is on TV saying that Dean is probably going to run away with the nomination because of a jump in the polls. (this poll being Poll Number 5,558 of the election season) It is my conviction that these pundits and the polls that fuel their commentating are doing a great injustice to the American political process.

Can you imagine who you would vote for if you didn't know who was behind and who was ahead in the poll of the moment? What if you read one newspaper story a day and saw one television news story a night about the campaign? You might have heard about Howard Dean's infamous scream, but would you have also heard the personal opinion of no less than 20 different politicos about what the scream would do to Dean's candidacy? Would you have heard the Dean Scream remix? Or what about yesterday... How many times did I see Joe Lieberman stand up in front of a room of supporters and tell them that he had Joementum? If I saw it only once I might have laughed. But I saw it four times just during the 30 minutes I was on the treadmill last night. And by the time I read my workout summary on the eliptical machine and headed to the weight room I was thinking that Lieberman was pretty much an idiot. (and I used to like him) Television has the uncanny ability to magnify one moment and turn it into an eternity by replaying and commentating and polling and picking apart. The men and women who are spouting off their predictions on TV are creating self-fulfilling prophecies. How many times does a voter need to be told that their candidate has no chance before they pick someone else in an effort not to waste a vote? If we didn't have this insane news cycle who would be ahead right now? Would Kucinich have received some votes? I don't know, but I imagine things would be very different.

Toward a Solution:

I know that most people in the media do not want to harm our democracy. They got into the profession to protect it. But I also know that news organizations are under a great deal of pressure to have the most recent and relevant information and to have everything first. Somehow this has turned into the game of who can conduct the most polls in a day and who can have more political insiders commenting on the polls. "Quick, call our polling company and have them call 500 voters. We need the numbers in an hour," I can imagine a news director shouting. I know the news networks aren't going to be silent any time soon and as much as I am frustrated with them, I don't even know if I could live without them... but what if everyone did a poll truce. What if CNN, MSNBC, FOX, BBC, ABC, CBS all got together and agreed to stop the polling madness and what if they agreed to all wait until a certain time after the polls closed on election days to announce the winners of elections. What if everyone went back to their newsroom and created thoughtful coverage that would inform voters about the candidates and then aired that instead of letting talking heads spout opinions and predictions? What if presidential candidates arrived at election day with records that had been fully examined by the media but personal lives and facial expressions and gestures that had not been visciously pecked apart. What if our politicans and potential politicians were allowed to keep just a shred of dignity during the election process? What if journalism discovered the line between responsibly informing the public about candidates and pandering to ratings?

Is this realistic? Maybe not. But the media needs to stop and think about what has happened to politics in America before it is too late and too late could be coming more quickly than we realize.



Some People Out There Might Agree With Me:

Read this very good and tangentially related article about the scream.