The media is an echo chamber
I had an interesting experience over the weekend. I went from door to door in some of the less classy parts of Gary, Indiana. It’s entirely possible you have never seen anything like some of the low income apartments I walked through. Think shot-out windows, toddlers wearing only diapers, and people peering mistrustfully from behind partially locked doors. In some of the areas where it was safer to just hang out, there were people who said they would love to vote for my candidate if I brought them a ballot—but there was no way they would walk to the polling station. And why should they? From their perspective, they would vote as sort of a courtesy to me—but most didn’t see their day to day reality changing by anything a politician did. This is one reason Gary traditionally has about a 20% voter turn out.
The sitting-around population is only a portion of Gary. Other portions of Gary hundreds of volunteers who drove busses to some of the low-income apartments, knocked on all the doors, and took everybody willing to walk to the parking lot to vote.
After an evening of knocking on doors, I went to see Michelle Obama speak. Suddenly the press was there—and there was something that looked a bit out of touch with most of them (excluding the nice guy from the Washington Post). They were all in suits looking impatient. The cameras were set up. The event was a performance. It was an effort to persuade the hundreds of people at the mini-rally to each get another twenty people to go vote on Tuesday. But to much of the press, it was another day watching a scripted speech. It was people in a suit watching a brilliant woman speaking to an anonymous room. The people had vanished. To the press, it was about votes, not voters.
But I didn’t say that the mainstream media was an echo chamber. New media doesn’t get a by—particularly when it’s just disecting and spinning what the mainstream media or other new media reports. There is a lot of the same bits of information repeated, recontextualized, modified, spun, and repeated. The press can report what was said, but often misses who it was said to.
Obsessively reading the news does not mean you know what’s going on in the world.