I completely agree with What Paul Krugman Hates About Political Coverage.
"One of my pet peeves about political reporting is the fact that some of my journalistic colleagues seem to want to be in another business – namely, theater criticism. Instead of telling us what candidates are actually saying – and whether it’s true or false, sensible or silly – they tell us how it went over, and how they think it affects the horse race. During the 2004 campaign I went through two months’ worth of TV news from the major broadcast and cable networks to see what voters had been told about the Bush and Kerry health care plans; what I found, and wrote about, were several stories on how the plans were playing, but not one story about what was actually in the plans."
In 1996 I did the same thing. I had moved and instead of moving my paper Globe subscription I tried to get my news from the web. I found I did fine on national news but not state or local coverage. To prep for the election I went through about 80 online Boston Globe articles, several months of coverage in one day. I found I learned about the ads the candidates ran and whether they were accurate and effective and how many people turned out for speeches and how they reacted but there were only a couple of articles on the candidates positions and platform.
This was before candidates had their own websites, maybe that's improved things a little, but when I looked a couple of weeks ago I found them all following the same template. They started with a full screen form to get you to sign up I guess for email blasts. Finding the platform information is difficult but at least possible. Maybe the news media is succeeding in making itself irrelevant.
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