Adrian OceguedaVerified account

but ultimately go read his excellent book. One of his arguments highlights that national media players have figured out they can be very polarizing and still make money, so that is why you see partisan cable stations and partisan online media.

However, at the state and local level most news outlets have to keep both sides happy because they need money flowing in from both the right and the left. And the @texastribune perfectly falls into this category. Because this state media has to keep both sides happy,

their articles tend to slant toward the horse race commentary and irrelevant color commentary. The implication is you get articles like this one, which seem serious but essentially will only cover poll numbers, fundraising,

and small color stories like irrelevant “mansplaining” incidents, twitter banter, and endorsements. They’ll cover anything as long as they don’t have to cover polarizing policy or things that might advance a voter’s understanding of policy differences.

Now you have to know that behind the scenes guys like @evenasmith look at this race and try to make a determination as to who is “viable”. They do this not because they want to be king makers although I am sure that plays some role in their decisions

(which are influenced by certain unconscious biases), but mainly because they want to maintain their perceived importance in the state media landscape. So, they only want to cover candidacies they deem as viable,

that they believe will have some level of success to maintain their own “perception” stature, which is a perfectly rational thing to do. Two years ago, in the gubernatorial race, this played out in their publication by creating the impression this was a two-person race

between @lupevaldez and @randrewwhite even though there were many more of us in that race. Again, most of what they covered was polls, fundraising, and color stories about Lupe’s background or Andrew’s father.

But consider that Lupe was sharing very little content, and what was shared was very light. In fact, many news endorsements pointed this out. Likewise, Andrew came out with a lot of policy proposals that were impractical and were called out such in editorial board meetings.

The point being the coverage wasn’t meant to advance policy differences, and this is where this coverage becomes both self-fulfilling and dangerous. First, understand most of the other local media took the same approach (@dallasnews, @houstonchron, @statesman, @expressnews).

If you only cover two (or a few) candidates, then what those candidates get is shallow but free coverage that serves to build their name and becomes the catalyst for a statewide primary echo chamber. Articles are written, candidates and supporters forward those articles,

those articles get posted on discussion boards and thus retweeted, competitive local reporters with limited budgets follow this reporting and believe this is the story line, so then they publish a similar line of coverage, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.

And then the when the election takes place, we see the results mirror the coverage, this is the self-fulfilling part. Now let me bring in a little Daniel Kahneman here and his brilliant book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.

So, because our minds predominantly go with name recognition, we enter the polls and we don’t have policy on the mind we have a name and maybe some vague prospect of viability in mind.

In order to consider weighty policy differences, one would have to think (use our mind’s system two) and because system one of our minds dominates and is a lazy system, we go for name recognition and general impressions.

These names are easier for our minds to retrieve because the media has done us the great service of repeating them over and over, so the slightly engaged voter goes to the polls recalling the general impression of a name not the policy stances of any given candidate.

with name repetition, and all with a backdrop of polarized national media informing your left right bias. What’s missing of course is any substantive thought on policy or the governance process, this is the dangerous part.

This is because the candidate that benefitted from this system becomes the elected official that benefits from this system. And those elected officials know that in order to win again, they’ll play the game again. So they will, as suggested yesterday,

appeal to those active members of their base (who donate) so they can win the horse racing game, even if it means they don’t govern. The implication for our media is not that we have fake news but irrelevant news,

and because it reflects a system of rational actors that produce irrational outcomes (bad governance), it makes it easy to attack.

So, the sick irony is that while key people in the media ecosystem may find it amusing to label certain candidates “viable” and others not, they are either complacent or blind in understanding their own contribution to an increasingly “non-viable” political media landscape.