Jeff sort of beat me to this topic with his mention of Librarians Against the Patriot Act. He asks “Why isn’t the despicable PA an issue in the upcoming election?” I’d been pondering a more general version of this question over the last couple of days, since reading Katha Pollitt’s recent Girlie Vote column. Although she’s writing about different issues, she concludes by asking, and answering, a question similar to Jeff’s.
As the title suggest, Pollitt writes about the candidates’ failure to address issues of concern to women, and the media’s failure to cover it when they do. She closes with “Why would they? What a candidate proposes to do in vital areas of government that affect women and kids–boring. Who looks more manly holding a rifle–now, that’s a campaign issue.”
As well as the issues mentioned above, there are many other vital issues that should be debated in this election, but won’t be: budget deficits, environmental destruction, chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate corruption, etc. Meanwhile the media continues to obssess over trivia. So the question on my mind is: Who’s to blame for the lack of attention to important stuff? Possible answers are: a) the candidates; b) the media; c) the public; d) all of the above.
Of course, most people, myself included, are going to pick d. Everybody deserves some of the blame, but I think I may surprise some people when I say candidates probably deserve less than the media and the public. What candidates really want is to get elected. And, if they thought discussing important issues would get them elected, they’d be doing it.
For example, let’s get back to Jeff’s pet issue, the Patriot Act. In the presidential primary, I voted for a candidate who did make an issue of the Patriot Act. He was one of the few members of Congress with the balls and integrity to vote against it when it was originally passed in the post-9/11 frenzy of Constitution-shredding, and he vowed to make repealing it a priority on his presidential agenda if elected. And what did it get him? Damn little mention in the media, and damn little support in the ballot box. (Should I call Jeff out on this question and ask how he voted in the primary?) So, after seeing how worthless opposing the Patriot Act was in terms of publicity and votes, is it any surprise that the candidates designated by the media as “serious” candidates don’t waste their time with it?
I think we’ve gotten stuck in a frightening downward spiral with public attention to important issues. The public settles for the crap the media dish out, so the media decide the public wants crap and give us even more crap. And it keeps getting worse and worse. The media aren’t going to start giving us better news unless we demand it. And a large and growing segment of the public doesn’t even know enough to know they’re being fed crap. So they lap up what the media feed them, reinforcing the media’s notion that they don’t want or deserve anything better.
So that takes us back to answers b and c. And we seem to be in a deadlock; neither is going to improve until the other does. Maybe a good first step towards pulling out of the spiral would be for more voters to support those candidates who do speak to the issues, rather than blindly accepting the media’s pronouncements that the only serious candidates are the ones who make the media’s job easier by saying nothing that requires thought.