Despite the rise of social media most people get most of their news from TV. TV coverage of politics rarely illuminates much because there is no clear way to decide who is right about anything. The format makes it almost impossible for any useful discussion to happen. Interviewers, politicians, and pundits talk past each other with no clarity about assumptions. Questions are vague, often meaningless, posed by interviewers who rarely have more than a thin bluffer’s understanding of any policy issue and the same is usually true of those answering; the more famous the interviewer, the less likely it is they know anything about, say, education policy and like David Cameron they are bluffing. (As soon as a story is deemed ‘political’ it is taken out of the hands of specialists (who are very rarely actually specialists anyway) and given to ‘political’ hacks who have no idea of the policy.) Most of those professionally involved are much more interested in the ‘horse race’ political dimension than the policy. They obsess on process and scandal but most people have no interest in the process or ‘scandals’ because they assume ‘they’re all dodgy in some way’. Nobody tries to make predictions that can be checked and the shows don’t take what is said seriously enough to catalogue it. Simplistic stories compete so political analysis is dominated by endless false dichotomies.
> Despite the rise of social media most people get most of their news from TV. TV coverage of politics rarely illuminates much because there is no clear way to decide who is right about anything. The format makes it almost impossible for any useful discussion to happen. Interviewers, politicians, and pundits talk past each other with no clarity about assumptions. Questions are vague, often meaningless, posed by interviewers who rarely have more than a thin bluffer’s understanding of any policy issue and the same is usually true of those answering; the more famous the interviewer, the less likely it is they know anything about, say, education policy and like David Cameron they are bluffing. (As soon as a story is deemed ‘political’ it is taken out of the hands of specialists (who are very rarely actually specialists anyway) and given to ‘political’ hacks who have no idea of the policy.) Most of those professionally involved are much more interested in the ‘horse race’ political dimension than the policy. They obsess on process and scandal but most people have no interest in the process or ‘scandals’ because they assume ‘they’re all dodgy in some way’. Nobody tries to make predictions that can be checked and the shows don’t take what is said seriously enough to catalogue it. Simplistic stories compete so political analysis is dominated by endless false dichotomies.
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