Why the media circus is good for democracy

Back in December, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, PolitiFact co-founder and Annenberg analyst, had some strange advice for On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone: the GOP debates were doing a lot of good, and they were worth watching. The debates, she said, were refocusing candidates and voters away from political advertising, and onto something much more substantive. Choreographed, narrow, overly rehearsed—the debates weren’t exactly an open, democratic forum—but even so, they were a heckuva lot better than attack ads and super PAC commercials.

And that difference was actually having an impact. GOP contenders in the final months of 2011 spent much less than in 2007. Now, for the likes of Mitt Romney, this imbalance was easily offset by super PACs and other groups unleashed by Citizens United. But for less well-endowed candidates like Newt Gingrich, whose own super PAC wasn’t fabulously well-to-do until January, the debates provided a valuable forum to get an alternative viewpoint across—free of charge. Without that kind of cheap exposure, Gingrich probably would have been finished a lot earlier.

Flawed as they were, for a little while the debates may actually have been more important to voters than political ads and campaign spending. But since then, the balance has shifted back. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center found that campaign coverage from major media outlets has dropped by about a third since 2008. Since January, when coverage was more or less equal to four years ago, news media have become steadily less interested in the current cycle. Pew points to a few reasons for this: more than one major party picked a nominee in 2008, Obama’s candidacy was seen as historically significant—not to mention how inevitable Romney seemed to everyone as early as February of this year.

But whatever the cause, the real issue is what effect it will have. There’s no question that overall spending will top 2008 levels. Super PACs supporting both Obama and Romney just announced new multimedia ad campaigns totaling $25 million—each (thanks, Huffington Post). As of March, each of the most-aired TV campaign ads was shown more than 4,000 times during the current cycle. The danger in all this is that, as mainstream coverage drops, PR and advertising become the dominant voices in these campaigns. News media’s function of contextualizing and challenging what’s said by advertisers and candidates is an important one, but it’s getting harder to find.

Read more: http://www.utne.com/politics/media-circus-democracy.aspx#ixzz1xE1cfTXn