The People Are the Story And Media Are Missing It

Photo illustrating the Christian Science Monitor story on public disillusion with elections.

At FAIR, we always say the primary measure of media in an election is not how fair they are to this or that candidate, but how fair they are to the people—all of the people who are affected by the outcome of this particular process, such as it is, and who need to see how it functions in relation to them and their needs and concerns. The people are the story—and how well they are represented by a process that’s ostensibly intended to do that.

That corporate media don’t see things that way is indicated by the resounding lack of interest with which they greeted a poll from the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (5/26/16). The  survey of more than a thousand registered voters found fully 90 percent lack confidence in the country’s political system. Forty percent described it as “seriously broken.” Seventy percent—equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans—said they were “frustrated” by the 2016 election; 55 percent described themselves as “helpless.”

Only 17 percent thought the Democratic Party was open to new ideas, while 10 percent said that of Republicans. Seven in 10 agreed that primaries and caucuses ought to be open. And 1 in 4 said they have hardly any confidence their vote will be counted! To underscore: These are registered voters—in other words, the ones who haven’t become totally disaffected.

Published by AP, the survey could hardly have been made more easily available to the press, but what pick-up occurred was in your Crystal Lake, Illinois, Northwest Heralds and your Davenport, Iowa, Quad-City Timeses—not that there’s anything wrong with them, but the Denver Post (5/31/16) and the Christian Science Monitor (5/31/16) seemed to be the only “big” outlets interested in a pretty darn newsworthy set of findings.

Media’s pretense is that they’re reflecting the political pulse of the US public whilethey’re focused overwhelmingly on elections that majorities are unhappy with. It’s like looking for your keys under the lamppost—not because that’s where you lost them, but because the light’s better.

Ralph Nader speaking at the Breaking Through Power conference (image: Real News)

And, by the way, while the most popular word people used to describe their feelings about the 2016 election was “frustrated,” the second most popular was “interested.” It’s that combination of frustration and interest that’s been drawing people together—at events like Breaking Through Power, the multi-day conference hosted by Ralph Nader in May in Washington, DC, aimed at mobilizing civic organizations. Media crickets.

In April, hundreds of people marched from the Liberty Bell to Capitol Hill in a protest called Democracy Spring, aimed at ending big money’s power over politics and ensuring voting rights. That, too, fell into a corporate media abyss.

And, of course, Black Lives Matter activists continue calling for real redress on life-and-death issues of state violence that are the key “political” fact of their lives—while most media have lost interest, flummoxed by the movement’s refusal to channel its concerns into the mechanisms of electoral politics that 90 percent of voters say are inadequate.

It’s hard not to figure that elite media prefer to just talk among themselves about what the public thinks and wants and deserves from the political process—without having to actually listen to them.

‘An Establishment…Led by a Corporate Media’

The American people are prepared to support real change. The difficulty that we have is not just the objective crises that we face—the disappearing middle class, income and wealth inequality, crumbling infrastructure, lack of universal healthcare and paid family and medical leave—the whole list of those things. That’s not the major problem. The major problem is that we have an establishment that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, led by a corporate media, which tries to condition the American people not to believe that we can accomplish those goals—or to even consider that those goals can be part of what American society is about….

What we have managed to do in this campaign is, they can’t avoid somebody [like me]. Tonight, we were on CNN—I spoke for a while, for seven minutes. They gotta put us on a little bit. And suddenly people are hearing things they never heard before. And that’s changing consciousness.

—Bernie Sanders, interviewed by Rolling Stone (5/31/16)