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DnA makes an important point on last night's debate (which I happily skipped): Issues like health care and Iraq and housing and education are not only the most "pressing" issues in an objective way, they are also the issues voters themselves identify as most important. And it's not as if ABC doesn't know this. They commission the polls in question! But this disconnect between the media and the voters has long been obvious. James Fallows wrote about it in his seminal essay "Why Americans Hate the Media," which came out over a decade ago:
The discussion shows that are supposed to enhance public understanding may actually reduce it, by hammering home the message that issues don't matter except as items for politicians to fight over. Some politicians in Washington may indeed view all issues as mere tools to use against their opponents. But far from offsetting this view of public life, the national press often encourages it. As Washington-based talk shows have become more popular in the past decade, they have had a trickle-down effect in cities across the country. In Seattle, in Los Angeles, in Boston, in Atlanta, journalists gain notice and influence by appearing regularly on talk shows—and during those appearances they mainly talk about the game of politics.In the 1992 presidential campaign candidates spent more time answering questions from "ordinary people"—citizens in town-hall forums, callers on radio and TV talk shows—than they had in previous years. The citizens asked overwhelmingly about the what of politics: What are you going to do about the health-care system? What can you do to reduce the cost of welfare? The reporters asked almost exclusively about the how: How are you going to try to take away Perot's constituency? How do you answer charges that you have flip-flopped?After the 1992 campaign the contrast between questions from citizens and those from reporters was widely discussed in journalism reviews and postmortems on campaign coverage. Reporters acknowledged that they should try harder to ask questions about things their readers and viewers seemed to care about—that is, questions about the differences that political choices would make in people's lives.You can argue, of course, that the voters are lying, or are intimidated, and that they really want to ask about remembrances of Kosovo but simply don't want to come off as shallow, image-obsessed dilettantes. What does it say, then, that it's the "elite" media who have successfully shed that self-consciousness?
