Imagine this. What if someone broke onto the floor of the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, and shouted random and/or insulting things at the candidates. Things like, “you’re an idiot,” or “Eisenhower rules” or “jeepers Mr. Nixon, you sure look sweaty.” First of all, that person would be swiftly removed from the room by a couple of burly security guards, and secondly, and most importantly, they would think that this person was being inappropriate, rudely interrupting the candidates, and not saying anything very valuable.
But people can now do that live-tweeting a debate, and the electorate may pay more attention to those comments than what the candidates have to say.
This is the world we live in now. While people often tout social networking as a triumph in human connectivity, I argue that it is not making democracy better or giving our citizens proper information about our candidates.
The structure of our news media is immense, complicated, constantly changing, and runs for 24 hours of the day. It not only dispenses massive amounts of information, but it creates subdivisions of viewership that are often partisan and opinionated. A news site often has to appeal to just one demographic to be successful, and in doing so, it tailors its purpose as a news agency to being appealing, rather than giving impartial and informative segments of news. The result is that news outlets have to be competitive for sponsors and viewers, and will often entertain any content to do so. This means the combination of opinionated articles, interactive blogging interfaces, and information that is geared towards viewer engagement, rather than informative content, is dominating journalism.
The people have a remarkable power to shape a candidate’s popular perception, without the candidate having a powerful role in the process. It is great that people have better tools to express their ideas, but we are not using this technology in the best way. Instead of pipelines of useful succinct information, with informative comments for political discussion, the needs of a modern media often distort these goals.
I am about to illustrate how complicated this whisper down the lane can be.
Say you are a political strategist back in the 1990’s. You wake up in the morning, grab your pager, your dial-up modem, and hop in your brand new Ford Taurus. Your candidate is running for President, and you want to get the word out on his or her position on Medicare. You have an entire day to draft a carefully worded press release stating the position succinctly. The press is then responsible for critiquing the candidate’s position and investigating what the candidate will do about it.
Now you are a political strategist in 2015. Since 5:00AM, MSNBC and Fox News have been reporting on your candidate’s supposed position on Medicare, because it was leaked that your office was going to make a press release. You update the Twitter page with a few blurbs and post a photo of the candidate on Facebook. You then run to the office, and draft not only one, but also two or three press releases as quickly as you can. Then, not only do those news outlets announce that you have drafted a press release, but they also report on how it’s trending on Facebook and Twitter. News outlets have to somehow fill those 24 hours so if you have nothing to say about your candidate, they will report on what everyone else is saying.
Are you exhausted yet?
These are, of course, hypotheticals, but this is exactly the kind of pressure that political campaigns face. If the goal of a political process is for the candidates to clearly articulate who they are and what they are about, to engage the people and inspire them to vote, to give them a clear voice and vision for their party – our new mode of political engagement is failing spectacularly.
When we don’t have a clear message from our candidates, we don’t know which choice is better. In a world where we have the opportunity to become more engaged in politics, I fear that we are becoming less engaged. Public policy discussions are being fragmented into partisan entertainment pieces, because this is what people want.
I say that we can make substance interesting and worth viewing, but we have not figured out a way to do it yet.
The reason I write about media in politics is that I am trying to figure out how I should write my articles on politics and public policy for Her Campus. What makes the decision so difficult is that I have very little accountability to anyone. With the combination of the First Amendment and the numerous sources for news that are available over the Internet and your cable channels, I can make these articles whatever I want them to be. As long as I can get your attention, I will remain a writer, because I am not the only one you are going read.
One option I could take is that I could just write about my opinions. If I tell you my political leanings, the people who share my ideology would be most likely to subscribe to my articles. I am a registered Democrat with political leanings to the left. I could tell you what I think about policies proposed by the right, tell you its flaws, and give you passionate accounts of how I feel without many facts to back up my position or many counterarguments that I could address. These kinds of modes of political commentating are very exciting to people, are very successful, and are very likely to be appealing.
But this would be wrong and unfair. It would be a disservice to you, because I know that all great policies have two sides to the argument. The best way to figure out which policy would be better is to put both arguments on the table and discuss their merits and flaws in full force. I learn so much from people with whom I disagree. To be honest with you, I am not a politico, I am a policy wonk. I tend to be more interested in how much the government is spending on medical research grants than on how Jeb Bush is polling in Iowa. I don’t like to win arguments for the sake of winning them, I like to win arguments knowing that the policies I advocate will be best in the most comprehensive way possible.
And so with that in mind, I come to this conclusion about how I should write. This is in the form of a promise to you and goal for this series. My promise is that I will always address counterarguments, and give you both sides of the story. It is the only way to decide who we want to vote for. I will give you bipartisan, investigative and well-researched articles that inform you of new up-coming policies, and give you some clarity about our political system through the muck and fog of asinine debates. I may lean towards one policy over another, but I will make sure that both sides are addressed and heard. I may be passionate, but I will never let my passion get ahead of the facts.
And that brings me to my goal: my goal is to write this way, and make it interesting to you. I want to prove that writers can talk about issues and not be derisive. I want to prove that it can be entertaining to talk about the virtue of ideas rather than the folly and human foibles of candidates. It’s going to take many more writers than me to make this happen, but from this day forward, I will use all my humor, and all my passion, in order to convey my love for public policy and your invaluable role in forming it.