Old and In The Way

Old and In The Way - The City Pages' Steve Perry bounces back and forth between paranoia and perception in this week's cover story on Karl Rove.

So tell me - in this next section, the "money" section of the piece - which are we seeing?

"It's said one quality that sets Rove apart is his ability to see the whole playing field in politics. So let's talk about the playing field that Rove seems to see.
Start with the people. They are tired, overworked, and scared--about their own livelihoods and threats from without. More important, they are woefully ignorant and easily worn down concerning the details of any political subject. They are acclimated to political races in which the main differences revolve around personality, and they're comfortable making almost entirely emotional decisions about candidates. This is an overgeneralization, but to date a viable one.

It may be "viable" in the sense that most people have little time or interest in detailed wonkery, whether due to being "tired, overworked or scared" (those dang Republicans!) or merely having real lives.

However, I have a hunch that the average American knows quite a bit about issues that matter to them; by the time they get jobs, they get serious opinions about taxes; by the time they have kids, schools become an issue (pro or con); while the likes of Perry would no doubt sneer, a lot of Minnesotans were very interested in the politics of the JetSki in 1998. An awful lot of Americans - NRA members - are more literate in the politics of the Second Amendment than the majority of the news media.

The media: On a mass basis, the medium that matters most by far is television. According to a 2003 Pew Research Center study, over 80 percent of Americans claim to get most of their news from TV. And if you take the further step of looking at TV news viewership numbers, you will find them pretty underwhelming. The only sensible conclusion is that a great many Americans consume political news in sporadic, sidelong fashion if at all.

And it's here that Perry turns myopic.

There's another "sensible" conclusion; Americans are getting their news elsewhere. Rush Limbaugh is the primary news source for an awful lot of Americans. This probably scares Steve Perry (as it would scare me if they got their news from "Babelogue"), and I'd suspect these people don't show up on as many polls as the Volvo-driving free-range Alpaca-wearing MPR-listening types, but it's information. What people do with that - or any - information varies from person to person...

...but to say "people are watching less TV, ergo they're getting less news information is the kind of thing that shows what a traditional media insider Steve Perry has become.

Many others try to follow events, but lack the time for anything beyond a few minutes of cable news and glance at their newspaper's front page.
Two things follow: First, the relative impact of political ads versus news coverage is much greater than a casual observer might think."

Right. Because the people are such a bunch of mental laggarts that if you were to put on an ad telling people to eat woodscrews and drink varnish, the people - tired, overworked, scared, and self-bereft of the wisdom of TV news to tell them otherwise - would probably do it.

Posted by Mitch at March 24, 2004 05:25 AM