What did Scott Brown's recent election for the late Edward Kennedy's senate seat in Massachusetts mean? If you're a Democrat, you might argue that Martha Coakley, Scott Brown's opponent, was a poor candidate who didn't take the election seriously and that special elections are notorious for producing odd results due to low levels of turnout.
If you're a Republican, you argue that his election was a broad referendum on the Democratic Party and their legislation and spells certain doom for Democrats in the coming November midterm elections. Then you take your narrative and say it over and over again because you want it to become the conventional wisdom of the chattering political class. And lo and behold, if you repeat your narrative enough and get enough other people to repeat your narrative for you, it starts to become fact.
It's called "horse race" politics. You talk big about your horse: how much training it's had, what a good breed it is, and how many races it's won before. Sooner or later, you've talked so big that it's like you've already won before the race even started.
It's typical during a campaign, but it has become increasingly more common any time an analyst opens their mouth. And that's a huge, though often ignored, problem. We want and need the media to help us process the inner workings of our government, not to color every story so that it sounds like their horse is on top. There's an absolutely vital role that the media can play, they just aren't doing it yet.
For instance, I can't imagine why anyone would bother to read Karl Rove's take on President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address. Everyone already knows that the nicest thing Rove is ever going to say about Obama is that his ears aren't quite as big as they are usually made out to be. As the former deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush and one of the architects of the entire Bush presidency, Rove is hardly without investment in his analysis of Obama's address to the nation. Whatever Rove has to say will be an ad hoc, contrived argument to get you to think that Democrats are incompetent.
The same sort of shoddy analysis occurs on cable news shows everyday. A "Republican analyst" and "Democratic analyst" interpret every major address and political moment for us, every hour of the day. But those interpretations always paint the other side as out of touch and partisan.
Eventually, competing analysts just start yelling over each other, unwilling to let go of their carefully constructed narrative.
Of course there's no truly objective observation when it comes to judging something like Obama's State of the Union Address. Independent of a political agenda, political experts are likely to have many disagreements over the delivery and content of his speech. But those experts don't even try to push aside their own opinions. Instead, they take every opportunity they can to push for their own party, abusing whatever trust we had left in our media.
We're all to blame for this. As consumers of the news, Americans demand sensationalism. We'd rather have it be interesting than unbiased. We'd rather be given a simple narrative, like the Democrats are losing, than a more substantive discussion of policy and its ramifications. The executives of cable news shows and newspapers help exploit this weakness.
They know that it's much easier for us to process the news if it's broken down into a simple, easy-to-follow narrative. Complexity and nuance don't make for a good headline. And the actual analysts and opinion writers push their own agenda, taking advantage of bottom line executives and gullible consumers for their own political profit.
None of this is a critique on having robust political diversity in the media. Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann, two nightly commentators at opposite ends of the political spectrum, can play very important roles in our national dialogue. They can vigorously debate policy, values, and the role of our government. They can argue about the direction of society through their respective ideological lenses. But we don't need them to tell us what Scott Brown's election means if they're simply going to twist their political diagnosis to meet their own political ends.
Even here in the opinion section, we engage in this sort of predictive forecasting that hides our real political ideas. I'm guilty of it too, but why don't we spend more time as writers thinking about the many real challenges and problems of the world and less time telling the student body whether or not Obama is popular this week?
When Dan Balz, the so-called "Dean of Washington" and writer for the Washington Post, discusses the political winds of the moment, he actually influences the perceptions of legislators and policy makers in their endless endeavor to gauge and react to the politics of the moment.
But without quite as many readers as Dan Balz, the best we Orient opinion writers are going to be able to do is convince our peers that a debate actually exists. We might as well come out and say what we want the world to look like instead of hiding it in our electoral calculations. Let's agree to do away with the deceptive practices that we see in the national media.
As a society, we should demand more integrity from our journalists. This doesn't have to mean requiring commentators be unbiased, since such a demand seems impossible, but instead insisting that commentators are honest with us about their intentions. Unless we ask for more, executives will never give us more and journalists will continue to play to our simpler sides. Politics, in the personality-driven, celebrity, trash-talking-about-the-other-team sense of the word, matters, but only as much as we allow it to.