The dubious value of primary debates

Posted on January 30, 2012 | Leave a comment

Televised candidate debates have become the marquee spectacles of presidential campaigns. By the time Republicans vote in the Florida primary, candidates seeking the party’s presidential nomination will have debated 19 times since May. That’s 30-some hours of live national TV, plus untold hours of recap, recrimination, chatter and miscellaneous noise churned up by the events.

Now, as somebody who deplores the larcenous rates commercial broadcasters normally charge candidates to reach the electorate, I’m glad. The debates constitute a grant of free TV time to hopefuls who might otherwise be priced off the air and out of the race.

But beyond that, since debates seem certain to be a feature of U.S. elections as far as the eye can see, it’s worth asking about how they affect the way elections are conducted and decided.

At the outset, a huge core fact: These debates are TV shows. They aren’t events arranged independently by candidates that the media then decide are newsworthy enough to broadcast. They are classic pseudo-events, in the late Daniel Boorstin’s memorable term — they happen only because they’ll be televised. Accordingly, media organizations far outnumber all other co-sponsors: Of this season’s 19 Republican debates, Wikipedia notes, four co-sponsors were foundations or universities, 12 were political entities, and 34 were media organizations.

That’s not new. The 2008 primaries, when both parties had fierce primary races, had 34 debates, according to the Democracy in Action website. The co-sponsors: 13 political groups, 14 foundations or universities, and 55 media organizations.

This co-dependency rests on warm and cozy mutual advantage: The candidates get to tee up their messages, the media get a self-replenishing source of quotable utterances. Broadcasters, who nowadays break less and less news, get a cheap and exhilarating chance to once again be a vital source of current affairs programming.

But to what effect? As a fan of this season’s GOP debates, I began wondering whether their overall impact on political discourse was, in partisan terms, absurdly one-sided. For months, hours of television time had been given to aspirants who agreed on little but their conviction that the Obama administration has been a disastrous failure.

There was no room for dissent on that fundamental premise. Debate protocol, obviously enough, enables candidates who are attacked to respond. But if someone egregiously distorted the facts about the incumbent administration, and nobody on stage thought they’d win any friends by correcting the distortion, the false assertion stood unchallenged.

Now, consider the cumulative impact of having dozens of hours of such lopsided discourse, in which the only push-back came from within the closed universe of a single party. It occurred to me that the overall consequence of such an intensely covered primary season, when candidates from one party vied before national audiences to run against a sitting president, might be powerful tailwind for the challengers and against the incumbent. Continue reading →

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A move toward media transparency in campaign spending

Posted on January 16, 2012 | 3 Comments

The most squalid and anti-democratic element of the U.S. electoral system is its insatiable appetite for money, vast rivers of money. It transforms our leaders into supplicants, required to contort themselves and their policies to please rich patrons.

Current spending forecasts for all candidates in the 2012 races run as high as $8 billion. That’s nearly double the $4.2 billion of two years ago, which itself was double 2008’s spending. The public has only scant understanding of how insane these outlays are by historical standards. The 1996 general election — presidential, congressional, the works — cost $651 million. The major presidential candidates spent $343 million on their races in 2000; eight years later, in September 2008, the Obama campaign alone raised $150 million in a single month.

The harm that this dependency has done to our politics is a rich subject for investigative journalism, and the litany of corruption related to fund-raising, lobbyists, earmarks and the like offers perennial reasons for the rancid cynicism with which even people who aren’t especially well informed regard political life. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution’s guarantees of expressive freedom outweigh the damage done by letting office-seekers bargain away whatever they must to coax unlimited funds from the wealthy so they can drown out their opponents at election time.

Still, most of the rest of us concede the electoral system’s gluttony for money is corrupting. So who benefits? Here, the undisputed beneficiary is the media, especially local, ad-supported broadcasters. In 2008, for instance, of the record $760 million raised by Obama, $427 million went to media of all kinds — from direct mail and billboards to newspaper ads. Of that, $244 million was spent on local radio and TV, Newsmax.com reports.

Just so my argument is clear: The biggest single reason for the worst thing about our electoral system is that to reach the voters, candidates need to pay the media a fortune. Hence, it’s no surprise that the news media rarely denounce runaway campaign spending. And if there ever were a movement, heaven forbid, to actually require broadcasters — in exchange for their licenses to use the public airwaves — to donate air time to electoral candidates, as other advanced democracies do, you’d hardly expect support from the National Association of Broadcasters.

But there is some minimal way these media barons can serve the system that feeds them so lavishly: They can maintain careful logs of campaign ad buys and make them readily available so that the public can learn who’s spending what and for whom. If the media are to be conduits for influence, the public can at Continue reading →

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Remember Iraq?

Posted on January 1, 2012 | 9 Comments

 

The U.S. war in Iraq ended just before Christmas, and if you blinked you probably missed it. TV news coaxed some seasonal sentiment out of the troops getting home for the holidays, but the Sunday morning talk shows—where news of consequence is usually autopsied—barely noticed. The Beltway sages had weightier matters to discuss, such as the Gingrich ascendancy and the latest Congressional standoff.

The silence was understandable because the topic is so awkward. The Iraq war wasn’t a defeat, like Vietnam. But it wasn’t a win either: Saddam Hussein is long gone, but the strategic menace the invasion was meant to thwart was bogus, the installation of democracy seems shaky at best, and the country seems on the verge of tearing itself apart again.

Besides, the Iraq victory lap was used up back in 2003 when George W. Bush, in a supreme moment of presidential buffoonery, pranced across a carrier deck in flight regalia to declare peace just as a calamitous civil war was starting.

So while the news media might like to imply that the war concluded successfully, that’s a hard case to make, especially with our Iraqi friends referring to it as a “foreign occupation.” And faced with a perplexing moment of historical ambiguity, the media did what they do whenever a clean story line eludes them—change the subject.

Our country isn’t unique in making war needlessly, but we may be unique in our insouciance. Attention really should be paid. After all, destroying another country is a big deal. Between 105,000 and 130,000 Iraqi civilians died Continue reading →

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Remember the wave of satanic child sex abuse hysteria? You should

Posted on December 19, 2011 | 1 Comment

The accounts of sexual predation involving coaches at Penn State and Syracuse haven’t yet boiled over into a full-fledged moral panic, but there’s good reason for the media to be mindful of that potential. It has happened before, notably in the wave of hysteria—and prosecutions–in the 1980s and ‘90s over sweeping accusations of ritual sexual abuse at child day care centers from South Florida to the Pacific Northwest.

The scale of that lunacy is rarely discussed now, and to people who weren’t around it’s almost unimaginable. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in a tough 1998 series by reporters Andrew Schneider and Mike Barber, summed it up this way: “During a prosecutorial fury that swept the country from 1980 to 1992, there were at least 311 alleged child sex rings investigated in 46 states…. Children told stories that were appalling…. sex rings were run by Satanic cults, dozens of children raped by scores of adults, dozens of babies were killed and eaten, horses slaughtered in playrooms, children raped by men in black cloaks while the women waited in line for their turn.”

The scathing P-I series was prompted by an especially egregious case that broke in 1994 in the small central Washington town of Wenatchee, where 60-some people ended up charged with 29,726 counts of abuse involving 43 children.

By then, a national pattern had emerged of inquisitorial fervor and investigative contrivance: Triggered by fears with paper-thin support, panicky parents–some of them unstable–would demand action. Preschool-age children would be coaxed by so-called experts to recall, or imagine, extravagant sexual atrocities from months or even years before. Their denials were counted as symptoms of repression, hence as confirmation. Physical evidence was rare. Adult “witnesses” were leaned on heavily to back prosecution theories. Scores of people were convicted and sentenced to Continue reading →

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Herman Cain, infidelity, and electoral coverage

Posted on December 5, 2011 | 11 Comments

All along, the Herman Cain campaign–which Politico called “one of the most hapless and bumbling operations in modern presidential politics”–has been riveting but improbable. Yet whatever the ex-restaurant executive’s other gaffes, misdeeds and missteps, Cain’s bid seems finally to have crumbled because of extensive coverage of a woman’s allegations that she had a 13-year extramarital romance with him.

Some Cain supporters have cried foul: “Private, alleged consensual conduct between adults,” said his lawyer, Lin Wood, is “not a proper subject of inquiry by the media or the public.”

That’s a point worth examining. Why isn’t this private? How much should the news media care about a past amorous liaison? As Brad Hirschfield asked in his Washington Post column, “Does it matter if Herman Cain had an affair?”

The general argument for exposing personal misconduct is that it sheds light on Continue reading →

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