This weekend, Nicholas Beaudrot on Ezra Klein linked to this eleven-year-old Atlantic article, Why Americans Hate The Media. It's a good seven pages long but Fallows effectively makes his point: the media cares more about the game of politics than the issues being batted around. They report endlessly on the political fights and how it affects the politicians' careers rather than actually examining how the issues the politicians are at least deigning to discuss will affect people on the ground.
Back here in 2007, we see the same issues playing out in real time. There's been a media fuss over the fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over remarks on the YouTube Democratic debates. We readers are only let in on the actual substance of the debate as a way to bring us up to date on who is "winning." But how does this fight tell us how each candidate will handle the presidency? What does it tell us about how our foreign policy will be conducted? How the world will change as a result of the candidate's governance? And beyond that, do the policies advocated by each candidate indicate any larger philosophies that will affect how they govern domestically? That will prove to have a real impact on the common citizen's everyday life? What would that impact be?
No: we're only told which candidate is "winning" the game.
It's left to bloggers to dissect what the game means. The media is obsessing over the trajectory of the ball—while the rest of us are trying to figure out whose window is going to get smashed.
