Los Angeles- Barack Obama doesn’t have a lot of experience; Hillary Clinton is an uptight control-freak; John Edwards has been called derogatory names by a number of political pundits painting him, at best, a soft-liberal; John McCain is too old, sick, and probably senile; Mitt Romney is devoutly Mormon and Mike Huckabee a religious nut; Rudy Giuliani is a one-hit wonder.
If they’ve watched or read any news at all in the past few months, residents of the 23 states hosting primaries and caucuses next Tuesday will undoubtedly bring these media-generated narratives with them to the polls.
As so many past presidential campaigns and elections have proven, we have a tendency to quickly link candidates to a certain character trait or policy stance that sticks with them throughout their race for office. Such defining narratives prove unforgiving historically, both in the media’s coverage and at the polls.
In the same way Al Gore was cast as a “liar” in his election cycle and President George W. Bush a “dope” in his, a number of presidential hopefuls have already fallen victims to such categorizations, many of them grossly exaggerated. History shows that as we near November, it’s only going to get worse.
Sometimes it seems as if our media outlets believe no one is fit to lead the country for the next four years.
Fueled by late night talk shows, comedy sketches and 24-hour televised political analysis, the stories that “sell,” according to many journalists, are the ones that fall within the context of whatever we already think to be true about a candidate, true or not. And stories that “sell” make up the majority of stories that “run.”
NYT, TXA and GCI are the ticker symbols of three of the most influential news-media outlets: the New York Times Company, Tribune Company and Gannett Company; They are companies with investors, and are accountable for how much revenue they generate, and
in turn, how much they sell. This helps shape their coverage.
But all hope is not lost. The most recent political environment has given us a new hope for some legitimate social discourse and an informed voting demographic. There is a distinctly different aspect unique to this election and none other so far. In a word: access, and lots of it.
The average voter has more access than ever to engage in discussion and learn about the candidates. Every major news outlet has an election site and recent Google search yields 3,440,000 results to the query “2008 presidential election.”
There is a new group of players in this game coming out in full force for this election cycle and they will either prove to compound and add to this damaging tradition or will, contrarily, weaken and break it.
Many of them have no quotas to fill, investors to please or agendas to set; a lot of them just want to have a say, and some have proven to be wildly talented and popular. They’ve taken to the Internet and made films, written articles, created pod-casts and taken pictures.
Wonder who it is? It’s you.
The American population is a “part” of the process more than it’s ever been before and with citizen journalism on the rise and thousand of blogs popping up every day, the average voter has the ability to revolutionize the process by utilizing their newly-found access.
What we do with the access will determine how this new reporting niche will act for years to come. Will the individual bloggers become obsessed with beating the news media conglomerates and report the same stories and chase the same broken narratives like the “real” media has done for years?
The power and affordability of blogging and the Internet takes away a lot of the constraints mainstream media companies have to pay attention to, and simultaneously sacrifice the integrity of their coverage for. Most blogs can be launched for free and are easy to set up and update.
Hopefully this election acts as a springboard for a new and different type of political reporting. While there is some truth to the characteristics first mentioned about the candidates as this article opened, that should only be one part of the story, not the filter through which the voting population must look if they want to learn about the candidates and election.
In 2006, Time Magazine said “You” were the person of the year. More than ever, you can make a difference and have a hand in shaping the future of the country in ways far more powerful that solely punching a card in a voting booth.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Citizen journalism goes both ways...it both opens doors against ad-driven conglomerates and muddies the waters a bit when it comes to truth and accountability. When everybody can go by mrbaseball302 or proudamerican5, who is then accountable for what is out there. Yes, there are more outlets than ever before...yes, there are more voices and opportunities for voices than ever before...but who's to say that those voices aren't just influenced by the mainstream media anyway? Who's to say some of those voices don't just take what the "real" media has to say and run with it? Both opportunities and drawbacks, and WE will be the ones in the middle of it all, figuring it all out for ourselves.
Some wonderful observations in this post -- Your nut graph should have been higher in the story. On the Web, you gotta cut to the chase much more so than in print.
Post a Comment