Election 2012 and the media: a vast rightwing conspiracy of stupid

Our election coverage is a betrayal of the American people.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/30/election-2012-media-vast-rightwing-conspiracy-stupid

Election 2012 and the media: a vast rightwing conspiracy of stupid
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 August 2012 11.23 EDT

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The election process is ....what inculcates many Americans to believe that they enjoy vibrant political debate and stark democratic choice, even as so many of the policies that are most consequential and destructive for their lives – the "war on drugs", the supremacy of the covert national security and surveillance states, vast inequalities in the justice system, crony capitalism that rapidly bolsters the oligarchy that owns the political process – are steadfastly ignored because both parties on those matters have exactly the same position and serve the same interests. (Watch how often Obama supporters will defend their leader from conservative attacks by proudly arguing that Obama's policies are actually the same as that which conservatives advocate: he's severely cut government spending even more than Bush and Reagan! Wall Street and corporate profits are at an all-time high! He's killed and killed and killed some more! His healthcare plan comes from a rightwing thinktank! Nobody has been more faithful to Israel than Obama! He's severely harmed Iran with sanctions and isolation! etc.)

It's where the candidates pretend to believe in a whole litany of base-pleasing and populist policies that enable their loyalists to claim there are vast differences between them, even though such campaign pronouncements have virtually no predictive value in determining what they will do in office – as the New York Times's Peter Baker, writing about foreign policy campaign platforms, put it today with great understatement: "the relationship between what presidential candidates say on the campaign trail and what they do once elected can be tenuous."

It's where the handful of important issues on which there are genuinely sharp and clear differences – social issues, reproductive rights, jurisprudence philosophy, a few social program and tax policies – are endlessly exploited to heighten cultural divisions and, more importantly, to obscure the similarities on everything else.

The election year process could and should be a meaningful opportunity for real political debate: the one time every four years when the majority of the population that is too busy or uninterested to pay much attention becomes engaged and thus informed. Instead, the process is the ultimate deceit. And the ultimate distraction.