It’s Feb. 9; do you know how many days, hours, minutes and seconds are left until Election Day 2008? No? Well then shame on you – you haven’t been watching your CNN.
If you had been watching CNN, or any other 24-hour news network, you’d be up to date on all the behind-the-scenes moves from the big time political players as they map out their presidential ambitions. And you’d be just in time; the big night is only a year and nine months away.
Does something feel wrong here? All of this anticipation for 2008 when we’ve only just begun screwing up 2007? It seems like we’ve come along way from the days of politicians touring the countryside, standing at podiums in the local town squares and talking straight with the people, convincing them their problems matter. Sure, they still do it, but the hype surrounding it is at an all-time high, making each campaign more about choreography and less about ideology. The wheels of big political machines are bigger and spinning earlier than ever before.
But does fault lie completely with the politicians? Certainly money plays a big role, forcing those who seek office to raise millions of dollars glad-handing with corporate executives and lobbyists. For the sake of time, consult your local disgruntled environmentalist for more on that (a drug-addled paranoid schizophrenic will also work). To understand the forces at play here, you’re going to need a quick anthropology lesson.
The Red Queen Theory is an evolutionary principle based on the character from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.”
“In this place,” the Red Queen tells Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” The idea is that in a constantly evolving world, each individual must constantly evolve with it – not to gain an edge over others, but simply to keep up.
Journalism has done some serious evolving over the past thirty years. When CNN premiered in 1980, it ushered in a whole new era of news, with updates and breaking stories around the clock. For more than 15 years it reigned as the sole emperor of up to the minute news for junkies and insomniacs. Then in 1996, MSNBC and Fox News were born, spawning an often vicious, sometimes erotic but never boring three-way of daily updates and reporting.
Maybe I should say that it is “often boring,” sometimes vicious but never erotic. As long as Bill O’Reilly has a show on Fox and a 2004 sexual harassment complaint, though, I maintain that it is a little erotic. What’s un-erotic is the effect all this press coverage is having on the political process. I know that sounds strange, the idea that more people keeping an eye on policymakers could be counterproductive. But at a certain point you have to ask yourself, “Who are these people with cameras and microphones, telling me what to think? At what point does the messenger become powerful enough to influence the decision maker? Who names their child Wolf Blitzer?”
It would be na’ve to say that there’s nothing unique about the upcoming election. The two Democratic frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, offer voters the opportunity to elect a female or African-American president for the first time in our country’s history. This fact alone is very newsworthy. But they’ll still be here next year; there will be plenty of time to tell their stories then.
The reality is there’s just not enough news to stretch out over a full day. And that’s the fun thing about news: Only the most exciting things that happen each day get to become news. The rest of it fades into obscurity, like bad little league memories and the first school dance you went to after you started drinking. When you make news a 24-hour affair, you dance with fire. The line between what’s news, what isn’t, and what’s just stupid is being eroded with each “breaking” report on a freeway collision 1,500 miles from where you live, and what one senator said about another at a Hurricane Katrina banquet fundraiser 1,500 miles from New Orleans. Real investigative journalism – Woodward and Bernstein must be proud
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