a year at the races

Upset as I am that the MSM is ignoring everything happening in the world in order to saturate us with campaign coverage—which is an entirely different issue—Jack Shafer says pretty much everything I think about the kind of coverage we’re getting: why not cover it as a horse race [e.a.]? ***

[Y]ou can no more divorce “horseracism” (to pinch Brian Montopoli’s coinage) from campaign coverage than you can divorce horseracism from the coverage of horse races.

Horse-race coverage isn’t the devil spawn of the television age. Scholar C. Anthony Broh dates horse-race coverage of campaigns back to 1888 …. [H]e catalogs its many pluses. Horse-race journalism increases voter interest in campaigns, something you can’t say for the average newspaper’s delineation of a position paper. “The horse-race image encourages reporters to emphasize competition rather than to forecast results,” Broh writes, …

Shafer catalogs some of the issues that have been raised (which helps to educate voters while entertaining them) , and then he makes the most important point of all: that the media is not the be-all and end-all for those those want to inform themselves about political platforms and issues.

But even if the press corps had abandoned substance, no voter is more than a mouse click away from detailed policy papers and unfiltered campaign speeches by the candidates. If you’re not an informed political consumer this year, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

He also makes the obvious point:

A political campaign is more than a traveling debate society. Beyond the issues, voters need to know why a candidate is (or isn’t) performing well in the polls, is (or isn’t) raising money, is (or isn’t) drawing crowds of supporters, or is (or isn’t) keeping his cool. Candidates win or lose for a reason, reasons that have to do with issue papers but also with how they carry themselves and present their positions. Candidates appreciate this fact, which is why they commission private polls so they can construct their own horse-race results and act on them.

Read the whole thing.

It’s so obvious a point: Politicians are competing for our votes. Why wouldn’t we want to watch the competition?

All I would add is that how candidates hold up under the pressures of a political campaign also gives undecided voters information they take into consideration when deciding (assuming that they’re paying attention, which is a big assumption to make).

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*** Anecdotal evidence indicates that the coverage is a hit. I know a lot of people who aren’t very much into politics who have been following the antics—it’s just another kind of Reality TV show!