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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.
(By the way my tribute to Kahneman’s thinking can be found in my first political ad linked here: https://youtu.be/4khbPcttUw0 ) So what we are left with is an echo chamber that consists of irrelevant horse race and color coverage by our local media,
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.
To his great credit Ezra acknowledges he’s a part of problem, the open question is, will our state and local media take the time to understand their actions, and do the same.
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