If you want see everything that’s wrong with our media and how it covers elections, just check out this clip from
Wednesday’s episode of Morning Joe on MSNBC.
Amazing, right?
Nothing about which candidate is going to break up the big banks, nothing about how each candidate plans to deal with our trillion student loan problem, and certainly nothing about fast-track and the TPP.
Instead, just an endless back-and-forth about “likeability,” because why talk about issues that actually matter to people when you can talk about which candidates seem nicer than the others?
It’s the whole “who would you rather have a beer with?” thing all over again, and it’s just as meaningless.
It doesn’t matter whether someone is “likeable” or not. What matters is whether or not they care about issues that affect real people and whether or not they’re willing to fight for those issues, regardless of what the billionaires think. The rest is just nonsense, as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out
during a recent appearance on CNN’s Reliable Sources.As usual, Bernie is right. Elections are not popularity contests -- or at least they shouldn’t be.
They’re a chance for voters and candidates to have an honest conversation about the problems facing this country. But the media doesn’t want that.
What the media wants is for everyone to treat elections like they’re the American Idol, where voters pick candidates based on how attractive they are or how much star appeal they can bring.
That’s because the media knows that if they ever actually talked about real issues, no one would vote Republican. And that terrifies the people who run the media.
The executives, the board-members, the advertisers – they’re all multi-millionaires who don’t want to see their taxes go up, and don't want to see their media empires regulated or even, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, broken up.
So instead of giving us news, they give us infotainment and gossip. And even when they do cover candidates who care about the issues, they try to marginalize them or only talk about them in the context of horse race politics.
