From Gatekeeper to Ringmaster: How the Media Created a Campaign Monster

Ever wonder why reason members of the public get angry at the major mainstream media outlets at election time? Here’s my answer: Instead of focusing on reporting the news, they emphasize interpreting it and predicting the results.

This doesn’t come across too well to the general public. Viewers and readers feel like they’re being told what to think and whom to support - or which candidates are (supposedly) viable and which aren’t.

But politics is notoriously fluid and changeable, so those predictions are often wrong, and this stark reality leaves media outlets in a no-win situation.

To wit: When the predictions misfire, they look as if they’re trying to drive the news rather than report it. Whether it’s true or not, they appear as if they’ve got a dog in the hunt or, at the very least, are being manipulated by spin doctors from the major parties or their chosen candidates. When the predictions are right, on the other hand, they tend to look like self-fulfilling prophecies, and people wonder what might have happened if the media had stopped speculating and started reporting.

As a member of the mainstream media, I understand why media outlets do this. There’s a nearly insatiable curiosity among the electorate to know the results as quickly as possible, and that curiosity results in web hits, viewership and readership. Speculation and prediction make for great clickbait.

When it comes to predicting outcomes, I’m not just talking about polls. I’m talking about the media’s role in interpreting these polls, even going so far as writing off some candidates, while declaring others “inevitable” before much of the voting is done. This benefits party hacks who operate under the credo “he may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB” and whose goal is to unify their troops behind a single standard-bearer as quickly as possible.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus reflected this mindset when he stated flatly, “I don’t care who the nominee is. Our job is to support the person that gets the majority of delegates – and whoever that is, is going to have the 100 percent support of the Republican Party.”

Even if it were David Duke? Joseph Stalin? Attila the Hun?

Apparently.

Setting the table

But back to the media. When its emphasis shifts from reporting to speculative analysis, do they cross the line from being a simple observer and actually become part of the story? It’s definitely a concern and, worse than that, a trend.

The tendency seems to be most pronounced on television, where the role of analyst as de facto cheerleader has evolved parallel to a similar development in sports. There, announcers have drifted from the traditional, dispassionate Vin Scully model to something that more closely resembles a ringmaster for pro wrestling. I’m not just talking about home team announcers, I’m referring to national announcers who try to “keep things exciting” by gushing over the winners as though they’re the second coming of Jim Thorpe, Jesse Owens and Babe Ruth all rolled into one.

Political commentators are taking the same approach, and cable TV election coverage in particular is starting to resemble a WWE free-for-brawl. Debate formats are designed to maximize the impact of zingers and minimize civil discourse, and their video intros look like the same kind of hype-driven buildup you’d see from Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania. Are the WWE founder and The Donald really that far apart in terms of self-promotion? (Both, incidentally, backed failed football leagues.) Is it any wonder that quite a few people have warned that Trump is really trolling everyone to promote his brand?

Trump is winning, in part, because media coverage has become tailor-made for the carnival barker, and he’s exploiting it because that’s what he knows how to do. He’s good at it. In a way, I can’t blame him, but I can blame the media for setting the table and drooling over the fact that he’s invited himself to their party of hype and glory.

It’s a symbiotic relationship that benefits both sides: One gets ratings, the other gets an ego boost – and the money from future book deals, speaking engagements and sponsorship agreements that’s bound to come with it.

What do the American people get? Entertainment. Which is exactly what the WWE is: World Wrestling Entertainment. It’s not real. But the presidential election is. Or it used to be. The way things are going, there’s reason to wonder.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Dysfunction

Have you ever heard a child ask, “Why are things this way?” and found yourself unable to come up with an answer?

Why do we continue to rely on a dysfunctional process? An inefficient and unfair system? For transportation. For employment. For health care. You name it.

This question of “settling” for dysfunction always seems to come up at election time, and for good reason. The staggered primary system effectively disenfranchises massive numbers of Americans eager to vote on the presidency – a problem is magnified by media outlets salivating to declare “winners” and “inevitable nominees” before the votes are even counted.

If you live on the wrong side of Super Tuesday, it’s likely you won’t even get a chance to vote before two-thirds or more of the candidates have dropped out of the race. 

The solution is simple: A national primary. We all vote at the same time in the general election, so there’s no reason it can’t be done when we’re picking the nominees. 

But even if we were to change the primary system, when we get to the general election, we’d still be stuck with the Electoral College, an antiquated monstrosity that skews the popular vote by awarding electors (for nearly all states) on a winner-take-all basis. If you live in California, which has favored Democrats by 10 to 24 percentage points in each of the past five presidential elections, the result is all but a foregone conclusion.

I won’t even get into the problem with unelected “superdelegates” on the Democratic nominating process or the problem with voting on a weekday rather than a weekend or – as has been repeatedly proposed – a national voting holiday.

These mechanisms have all been in place for years, decades or even centuries. We complain about them, despair at them, and yet nothing gets done to change them.

Why?

For the same reasons we resist alternative energy sources, higher wages and guaranteed health care. I call them the seven deadly sins of dysfunction, and they apply to families, communities and organizations just as surely as they do to nations.

The sins

Fear. No matter how much we might moan about the current situation, we’re scared that any alternative will be worse. So we settle. We call ourselves "pragmatic: for failing to pursue options that promise to enhance our lives because we fear they have the potential to screw things up even more. This isn’t pragmatism, it’s fear. As long as we tell ourselves we’re “just being practical,” what we're really doing is reinforcing the status quo.

Pride. “America is the greatest nation on Earth, and we do it this way, so it must be correct!” When we make statements like this, we forget that America’s greatness is largely a product of its willingness to innovate. From Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, we’ve forged greatness through change, not through blind allegiance to past practices. Pride is the great antidote to ambition. It says, “We’ve made it” and basks in the glow of self-adulation. Meanwhile, situations are changing that require us to adapt or perish. In this instance, the great spiritual teachers are correct: Pride is a killer.

Greed. Once we’ve established a predictable flow of dollars based on a given system, those who are on the receiving end of those dollars have a powerful incentive to keep it in place. And those dollars give them the power to perpetuate systems, even as they become damaging to the public at large. This is true whether the recipients are political Super PACs, banks, lobbyists, oil companies, health insurers or lawyers.

Power. Those with the money typically wield the power, but money isn’t the only problem. Those empowered by the status quo routinely use shame, threat, peer pressure, manipulation and intimidation to bully and goad those without power into accepting things as they are. And it works.

Resignation. “It’s always been this way” and “It can never change” are the mantras of those who might wish for things to change but have seen attempts at reform and innovation stymied repeatedly by those whose self-interest lies in preserving the status quo. If your experience tells you that change is impossible, you tend to accept the way things are as the way they should be. You learn to accept the unacceptable and rationalize it as “good” in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that exists between hope and reality. Welcome to Stockholm, my dear Syndrome.

Laziness. Sometimes, the necessary change seems to require so much effort it just doesn’t seem worth it. Switch to alternative fuels? How many oil workers will lose their jobs? How many gas stations will have to be torn down? It just doesn’t seem worth it. What’s forgotten is that we’ve done this before: Remember when the transportation economy consisted of railroads and horse-drawn carriages? Building the nation’s road and highway system was a far more mammoth undertaking than any conversion to alternative fuels would be. And the effort created far more jobs than were lost in the transition. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. Sometimes, it just seems like too big a pain in the ass.

Negligence. We just don’t want to think about it. Election reform is a prime example. Every four years, we complain about how badly dysfunctional our election system is. But then, once the campaign cycle is over, we forget about it. It’s just not a priority anymore, so nothing gets done. Then, before we know it, four more years have passed and it’s too late to fix things, so we just accept – and validate – the broken system once again.

There’s a broad array of dysfunction arrayed against any hope for change. But the good news is that we humans are, despite our stubbornness, highly adaptable. What we have to realize is that, while there may be no perfect time to embrace change, every moment that passes is a bad time to perpetuate dysfunction.