Can you picture a news corp saying to its audience, "Well, nothing of significance happened in the presidential campaign today, so we're moving on to..."
Now, in the approximately eighteen months in which campaign coverage is saturated, there are days, even weeks when very little happens that will be important to the eventual outcome. So what do the news corps do?
They make stuff up.
Remember, they are in the business of getting you to pay attention for as long as possible so they can push ads at you. That is the entirety of their business. The quality of the news they produce is of little importance to them if it doesn't affect ratings, and thereby, ad rates.
So what sort of things do they make up to keep your interest? Well, nothing keeps you interested like low-grade fear. High intensity fear might just make you switch off, or go watch cat videos. But a constant undercurrent of anxiety will keep you watching.
Talking head arguments are good for this. And while what paid spokesliars have to say isn't news, the news corps will pretend it is, knowing that the more the discussion devolves into a playground level slanging match, the more entertained and outraged you'll be.
Likewise, polls aren't news. Polls are used by news corps to create the "horse race" narrative, which is fundamentally dishonest. They do it anyway, knowing that a few percentage points in a poll of questionable reliability weeks before the election means nothing to the eventual outcome.
Who's ahead? Who's behind? The answer, until the votes are actually being counted is no one. You get no credit for your lead in the polls. It's not like an actual race where you can build an early lead and make your opponents catch up. When the actual counting starts, everybody is at zero.
Polls are properly used, and were intended for use by, political professionals to allocate resources and the presence of the candidate into certain areas. Since they can only show, with varying accuracy, the sentiments of certain people at a certain moment. They can't predict anything in the future with any level of accuracy. Things change every day.
Before you get excited or discouraged by a poll, ask yourself - "how was this poll taken? Who paid for it to be taken? Why is it being released to the public, and by whom?" You'll usually find that the people who paid for the poll to be done will, by some miracle, get the outcome they were looking for.
And, of course, the news corps eat it up. If they admitted the truth - that campaigning has much less to do with elections than targeted spending on ads, historical voting patterns and election day turnout, that wouldn't keep your attention for eighteen months.
They also love "gaffes." A gaffe is an embarrassingly dumb, or easily parodied statement made by a candidate that falls in line with the negative narrative that the media has settled upon. When Howard Dean was repeatedly pilloried for "the scream" after early primary success, the media wanted to paint him as a dangerous radical with no self-control. The scream fit that perfectly. When George Bush was fascinated by a grocery scanner, thus revealing that he hadn't actually done his own shopping for decades, this fit the media's caricature of him as an out-of-touch patrician. Dan Quayle was seen as dumb, and so when he seemed to misspell the word "potato," the media ran with it for weeks.
Gaffes are not news. Every candidate says dumb things every day. There's too much going on to make sure that everything your candidate says is not either dumb, really dumb, or easy to take out of context. The media chooses, via the narrative they have in place, what will be a "gaffe." Did it matter when Gerald Ford stumbled on the steps of Air Force One? Yes, because the media narrative was that he was a clumsy, awkward goofball. When Reagan did almost exactly the same thing, did it matter? No. Because that wasn't the narrative they were pushing about him at the time.
The media's political coverage becomes more "infotainment" than substance with each election. The truth is that there is no reliable way to predict the outcome of an election weeks or months out. It's voodoo. But the media will certainly try to convince you that important things are happening by the hour.
And if there isn't anything, they'll make something up.
This is why it is not news. It is designed to be entertainment, driven by bottom line mentality. Ever wonder why so many ads during broadcast news are ads for drugs? Because they are paying the highest ad rates keeping the networks profitable.
"When news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.” Neil Postman in "Amusing Ourselves to Death". 1985! So, we've been deprived of "authentic information" from the corporate networks for almost 40 years. Better look for and find a more reliable resource.
Ok I see your points , and understand . I am just so worried, I guess I cannot thing rationally ☹️