"News" coverage about political campaigns

The way the media cover political campaigns in the US is absurd. At best it reduces the role to entertainment, but I believe it is actively harmful to the process and thus the country. In whole, political campaigns have radically changed (I would say "devolved") over the past 30 years.

What do voters need in order to make an informed decision?

You need to know there view on a variety of views. You need some indication of how they operate under pressure. You need to know their views on governance. You need to see the sorts of people they surround themselves with, as these are the people who are likely advising them and will continue to advise them in office; as such you need to know the views of those people as well (which we don't hear nearly enough about).

Do we get that from the news. "A little." Very little. What do we get? We find out what the candidate did each day. We get their most compelling sound bite. And vastly we get information analyzing the latest polling data, campaign strategies, whether said strategies seem to be working or not, etc. Let's look at each group of information more closely.

Polling data. Really? Why could this be "news"? It is "new", but is it important for people to know? Who would need to know this? The campaigns need to know this, because they can then tell what is working and what isn't, how they may need to act. It may encourage people to join a flagging campaign if a person is passionate and the polls show it the candidate slipping (so that would be recruiting for the campaign, so that isn't really news-worthy either). It could help those who don't understand issues to see what others think so they can follow suit -- but I would argue that is not a valid way to vote (and thus it calls into question the role of yard signs, who's intention is to drive it as a popularity contest, create name recognition, and try to create peer influence via neighbors, none of which involve understanding candidate positions, and thus I would say actually are a negative as well, but I digress).

Last, polling data allows us to talk about who is ahead. "Wow, did you see that last maneuver on Saturday? After it that team went up by 6 points!" Hmm. Sounds a lot like you're talking about a killer deke in a college football game. But they could be talking about the latest attack ad for a candidate. 90% of "news" coverage about elections seems to be an attempt to treat it like a sporting event. To make it entertainment -- which is no surprise: since the rise of cable television news has felt it has had to entertain to maintain the viewership needed for advertising (when there were 6 stations in a local market, 3 of them were network affiliates broadcasting news at the same times, so their competition was other newscasts, PBS broadcasting something it would probably broadcast again, a couple of indepenedents possibly showing news themselves, or more likely showing reruns).

What is wrong with covering an election like a sporting event? Nothing if you are watching the events in another country. That is to say "if you are a non-participant". But elections are driven by the voters, and the "news" is aimed at the voters. So this is all giving voters entertainment and treating them as non-participants, rather than giving them the information on which to base a vote.

This provides a lens with which to look at the other favorite topics.

Next let's take "campaign strategies". First, how could this benefit a voter? It could help show how the campaigns are attempting to influence (nice version) or manipulate (nasty version) the voters. But when you couple it with "what strategies are working and what aren't" frequently coupled with called in experts opining on what the campaign should do, we are firmly back to the sporting event. There is another group who should look at this: political scientists; of course I'm skeptical that the CBS Evening News really is the latest Jounal of Political Science. So the net is that all of the talk about strategies are more an attempt to follow the format of the "Monday Night Football" broadcast than to enable voters to make an informed vote.

Last we have "What the candidate did each day, and a key sound bite." This is at least news. It allows you to find out who they are talking to and what they are talking about. But the campaigns know this, know that there is a "fairness doctrine" that requires most newscasts to spend equal time on both candidates, and we have for many campaign cycles had controlled access and creation of one "sound bite" to carefully control the message the news will report on.

So I am clearly arguing the current system is broken. What would fix it?

STOP reporting polling data. Report it once a week, period. Describe whether it has gone up or done, but don't speculate on why.

Quit reporting on the mechaniations of the campaigns, unless they are doing something deemed to be highly manipulative.

Continue to cover what the candidates are talking about. Use the time freed up from not doing the sportscast to go deeper: fact check the statements and report the good and bad; show how past behavior supports or refutes the assertions, and if there is past behavior that seems contrary, show if there was a point of change of heart and discuss it; explain where positions are coming from: expose the supporting cast and describe their views

Create a roster of topics to be covered, and cycle through them. There will be various aspects of: economic policy, national security, international relations, the role of government in education, labor, science, space, the role of the US military in the world, healthcare, Social Security, civil rights and liberties, etc, etc. I suspect we could list 100 topics. There will also be topical issues that arise (at the time of this writing we've recently had Russian/Georgian hostilities, and the proposed government bail out of financial institutions).

On one hand, candidates positions don't change often, so they aren't news. But on the other hand, nobody understands in detail what any of the candidates positions on more than a couple of issues, so while it may not have developed in the past 24 hours, it is new to the audience, it helps them understand a key aspect of the world around them (who they can vote for), and thus is certainly News.

In the age of the internet, it also means you can create a site documenting all of these positions. Campaigns now run for a year or more. Assuming 5 day a week coverage, that would allow you to cover 250 topics in depth, and catalog the positions in writing. I can think of no more valuable role for the news than to create such insight into the candidates in the interest in creating and enabling an informed populace.

While the founding fathers may have believed that we have a right to the pursuit of happiness, an entertained populace wasn't declared a linchpin of Democracy.