America’s Obsessive Campaign

[Valin]

Via Meadia: Walter Russell Mead

9/2/12

 

One of the advantages of extended overseas traveling in an election year is that you get to see just how pointless most of the daily election commentary and news reporting in the United States really is. The interminable US presidential election cycle (with people already beginning to speculate about 2016, heaven help us) has bequeathed an industrial press process of gotcha journalism, gaffe hunts and “scoops” that nobody will care much about 48 hours after they “break”.

 

Being away for three weeks in India gave me an excellent opportunity to break away from the daily round of excitable headlines and Big Brained punditry about insignificant events, and when I returned, acres had been covered in newsprint and cyberspace bulged with new comments, but little had changed. The dynamic that had been more or less visible from the middle of last winter was still with us. President Obama was still slightly ahead in the race, but Governor Romney was taking tiny nibbles at his lead. Slowly and irregularly, Romney was gaining ground as the GOP coalition rallied to its nominee — but there was nothing on which a serious prediction about November could be based. Either candidate could win the election; the incumbent remained a slight favorite but which candidate will win the election depends on things that haven’t happened yet and which cannot be predicted. None of the huffery and puffery in either the old or the new media can change that basic fact and we remain pretty much where we were six months ago. We had, however, all been very busy as all this nothingness took place.

 

(Snip)

 

What this means from the standpoint of readers is fascinating: we are spending hours and hours following the most exhaustively reported phenomenon in modern life, but we aren’t being told what is really going on. Not because incredibly sharp editors and reporters are scurrying like crazy to conceal the truth from the public, but because the mediocre bureaucrats who staff established news organizations aren’t smart enough to understand what is actually taking place. The legacy media is too stupid and too lazy to understand the event on which it expends more resources than any other — and as long as enough eyeballs are attracted by the show, it doesn’t really care.

 

(Snip)

 

 

 

 

 

Could somebody please explain to me why I or any other reasonably intelligent person should care the Mitt Romney put his dog on the roof of his car, or the Barack Obama ate dog when he was younger (BTW dog is pretty tasty), or any of the other hundreds of breaking stories on either candidates we see every day?

/rant