Following up from the previous post, one positive thing came out in Somerby’s report: Several of the journalists admit that while they find discussions of policy boring, the public eats them up.

Yep, the American public, the people we’re so often told have no interest in any of that stuff, have a greater interest than the people who report on it. Somerby quotes EJ Dionne, who suggests that may be because reporters covering the presidential campaign have big paychecks, a nice home and lots of health insurance, so they have no stake in candidates’ solutions; a lot of regular folk do.

I’m reminded of a polling session I read about during the 2004 Democratic primaries: When asked which candidate they favored, the Democratic voters in the survey demanded details of their policies, their positions, their plans. The pollster brilliantly deduced from this that the Democratic field must be very weak because Everyone Knows voters pick candidates based on how likable they find them, so if they’re even thinking about policy, that proves the candidates haven’t made enough of an impression.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Journalism, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.