If the Horse Race isn't a Nail-Biter the News Media Will Say That's What it is Anyway

The news media's propensity for presenting elections as "horse races" is notorious--and rightly so. The attitude reflects that media's operatives' preference for politics over policy, and personalities over issues--and for that matter, the nuts and bolts of governance that confront any elected official with profound limits to their power. The same attitude also reflects their susceptibility to being dazzled by "showbusiness for ugly people" (let us make that "showbusiness for ugly, talentless and uncharismatic people"), and their delusion that the broad public is similarly susceptible to being dazzled--which is yet another reminder of how remote from that public and its actual concerns they really are, and one might add, how profoundly irresponsible they are given what the stakes of elections are supposed to be.

Of course, as the notoriety of the tendency would lead one to expect, many have criticized this specific aspect of the news media's conduct over the years--to absolutely no effect on its behavior whatsoever, as tends to be the case with criticisms of the media and other institutions by anyone with a modicum of intelligence. The result was that when Robert Reich recently wrote in the Guardian about what seems to him the surprisingly close character of the year's "race" for the White House, and he dismissed the idea that "the media is intentionally creating a nail-bitingly close race in order to sell more ads" I thought him overly hasty in doing so. After all, faced with the possibility that their audience is losing interest those in showbusiness, for ugly people or the regular kind, seem to mainly think of doing the same thing they were doing before, but BIGGER! Thus does a media which favors the narrative of the "nail-bitingly close" race push that narrative even when it has no basis in reality whatsoever.

Does that mean that this is actually the case now, that the media is only making the race look "nail-bitingly close?" I do not know that. What I do mean to say is that this is what they have been known to do when such races have not conformed to their preferred style of campaign coverage, and what they can be expected to go on doing when that is the case, such that the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand the way Reich dismisses it--and that people of all political persuasions should think long and hard about this bit of media idiocy when considering what and what not to believe.