And in this ring…

“The year is 2019. The finest men in America don’t run for President. They run for their lives.”

– tagline for The Running Man

I follow the US elections like a sports season. Don’t tell me you don’t. It’s like the World Cup, the Superbowl, and War of the Worlds blended into one enormous polisci nerd’s wet dream. Fuck the Vince Lombardi trophy. The winner of this Grand Slam tournament gets to take home the presidency. Can it get any more high-stakes? Yeah, sometimes losers like Walter Mondale or Bob Dole run and ensure an uninteresting, one-sided election, devoid of drama. Not this time around. We are in for some serious smackdown shit. Moreover, this year’s Pennsylvania Avenue Derby is actually relevant.

The good folks at Pollster.com understand how to present things. Don’t tell me their map doesn’t get you going when all the states switch from one color to another. Following them swing back and forth is like watching an enormous, high-stakes, 300-million piece game of Risk. Having convinced myself of the absurdity of the electoral process (which is only one way to deal with coming of age during W’s presidency), I know which team I’m rooting for and watch the battle play itself out. I imagine this is part of the appeal of working for political machines. You get to feel like the dungeon master.

Let’s not forget the ultimate point of professional sports broadcasts: to entertain. CNN gets it. They understand that the Undecided Voter is in the minority – both in terms of the country as a whole, and in terms of their value as a viewer and consumer. They also know that the rest of us want to follow the horse race. We want gaffes to laugh at and verbal smackdowns (“lipstick on a pig,” etc.) to cheer for. We want to be involved, too, and news agencies are only too happy to oblige. Just remember: time spent objectively covering relevant issues such as AIG, interest rates, or housing foreclosures is time not spent updating your “Sarah Palin look-alike” cam. Once you know what team you’re rooting for, sit back and let the networks show you all the good, juicy bits. And then, you know, if your candidate wins and causes you believe in suddenly have a realistic chance of coming into being… well, I’m still hoping to find out what that feels like. It might make me have a little more faith in the American electorate.

Until then, I have found solace in the surprisingly prescient 1987 action flick The Running Man. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Ben Richards, a wrongly convicted man forced to enter a public execution gauntlet staged as a TV game show. Schwarzenegger survives the waves of gladiators thrown at him, and by the film’s end confronts Captain Freedom – played by former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. After a deadly battle, Richards finally defeats Captain Freedom and achieves his freedom. Afterwards, Schwarzenegger went on to become California governor and Ventura ran Minnesota. This is how awesome politics are in America.

I’m still rooting for Ben Richards to knock Captain Freedom off his post. At least I know the American media will try to make it exciting. They help flesh out the final facet of our elections: politics as comic book. The most classic American prose medium. From an entertainment standpoint, at least, there’s not really that big a difference between this…

and this:

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Media in the world of business

Many Americans are entrenched in the idea that the media can collectively be summed up as either liberal or conservative. In November 2007 the Media Research Center, a conservative news analysis group, celebrated its 20th anniversary by publishing “The top 10 Liberal Media Quotes from the last 20 years.” Eric Boehlert, a writer for the liberal organization Media Matters, asserts in a front-page article that “the press collectively helps whitewash Bush.” The news apparently assembles as a whole and unites against a single political ethos. People such as these forget what most news agencies in the US are: businesses. Not just businesses, either. Media giants such as Time-Warner and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation are multinational corporations in constant, high-stakes competition with each other for viewers, and, as a consequence, billions of dollars in advertising. More viewers means more money.

Ideally, the 6 pm news would look something like this.

More often than not, what viewers (interchangeably, “consumers”) tune in to doesn’t line up with what is most relevant, or of greatest importance to their individual needs. Rather, people tend to watch what is most viscerally attractive – that is, anything that really gits ya in the gut. Human interest stories are always up there – American human interest stories, that is. Things that people think they can relate to, however irrelevant on the grand scale they may be. Anything that recreates a “Law and Order” episode is generally a good bet. People are a lot more interested in Scott Peterson (“He looks like the guy down the street!”) than the tens of thousands killed in American carpet bombing. Don’t kid yourself about Abu Ghraib, either. It wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of making a national story without those juicy pictures.

Along those lines, anything that appeals to people’s sense of patriotism or nationalism is also a consistent bet. Remember how newspapers forgot to call Bush out on anything (Patriot Act, etc.) he did after September 11th and then, conveniently, acted as if they weren’t as complicit as every other lily-livered member of Congress in having such laws pass the test of public confidence? Media agencies will always go with the man on top during national crisis, even if the man on top is in the process of inserting himself into the country’s collective rectum. It’s not good business sense to risk offending viewers (and losing customers) for something as irrelevant as what’s actually happening.

Sex, as always, reigns supreme among news’ desirable qualities, so long as a news agency can justify covering it. I am willing to believe a paper would publish “Republican Presidential Committee Aiming For Critical T & A Swing Vote,” if it meant they could publish a picture of Sarah Palin in a bikini. Sarah Palin herself is a prominent beneficiary of such additional, unmerited focus. She would definitely be less of a hot news cycle ticket if she looked, for example, like Rosie O’Donnell. Sex sells. I bet you went straight for this paragraph just because it has a sexy picture next to it.

Despite its ultimate goal of accumulating capital, it would be accurate to say our media sometimes runs liberal stories and sometimes runs conservative ones. These days, it has uncovered a fair amount of shit on our current administration (though not nearly enough; that would be unpatriotic). One might even be tempted to say it has a tendency to highlight its shortcomings (unless we have our heads in our asses after something like Sept. 11th, that is). One would be remiss, however, to say such focuses are evidence of liberal bias. News agencies naturally cover (and react to) whoever is in power. Since Bush has been president for the last eight years, and Congress controlled by Republicans for its majority, conservatives can rightly be considered the top dogs at the moment. As such, their fuckups tend to make the front page. This would be the same if a Democrat were in office. Does anyone remember how brutally Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was covered? He didn’t have a chance in hell of escaping the public eye. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were Jerry Falwell or Karl Marx. People will tolerate a story (and watch TV) way past their normal breaking points when sex and power are involved. Ultimately, it is a victory for a news agency if it gets you to watch. Their advertisers (who provide, in turn, their payrolls) could care less if you’re intellectually fulfilled.

Rupert Murdoch encouraged the perception of collective political bias in the media by creating Fox News, which adopted the misnomer, “fair and balanced.” This is itself a shrewd venture: by appealing to a conservative point of view, whether or not it is legitimate, Murdoch captured a consumer group that mighth not otherwise have watched the news. Assumedly, “fair and balanced” means objective reporting, devoid of political tilt. Quite the opposite: Fox News goes out of its way to provide some sort of commentary, regardless of whether the point of view being defended or attacked is ludicrous or credible. The idea that both sides of a story should be aired, regardless of how many legitimate points are made, is new. If a story breaks the news that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, that’s not liberal, that’s simply the truth. That it happens to go against what the current administration’s policy dictates should be beside the point.

Don’t tell me CNN’s looping footage of Sarah Palin “Miss Alaska” photos is evidence of conservative over-coverage, or their in-depth book review of The Audacity of Hope shows them to be hopelessly liberal. In a business sense, a story’s primary function is not to enlighten, but to get the consumer to tune in. Media agencies are only following good business strategy and going where the money is. What could be more American than that?

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