News Journal: Blame the Trump surge on the media

A lot of people are predicting that this Thursday’s Republican presidential primary debate will reach a larger television audience than any previous event of its kind. That would be good news for a healthy democracy if all of those viewers were tuning in to learn more about the candidates’ policy positions. Fat chance.

No, it is likely that most people will be tuning in to watch The Donald, starring in another reality television show. Which one of the other nine contestants will he insult? Who will stand up to him? Who will be careful not to? What a wonderful, awful, mesmerizing train wreck we’re going to witness!

Way back in 1997, two respected professors at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania wrote a book called “The Spiral of Cynicism: the Press and the Public Good” and attempted to answer two questions: Why is the public so cynical about politics and government? And why do the vast majority of public issues that affect our day-to-day lives fail to generate either public interest or understanding?

After a lot of study and research, they concluded, “voter cynicism is…fueled by the manner in which print and broadcast media cover the political events and issues. The media’s heavy focus on the game of politics, rather than on its substance, starts the spiral of cynicism that erodes citizen interest.”

If the professors thought we were in a downward spiral back then, they would be appalled by how close to rock bottom we would get by 2015. Take what happened on July 21. John Kasich, the popular second-term Republican governor of Ohio who had previously served for years in a leadership role in Congress, announced his candidacy for president. Kasich actually delivered a substantive policy message in his announcement, but you didn’t read about that on many front pages. The big story of the day was what Donald Trump said about John McCain.

That’s how politics get covered these days. There’s an obsession with the latest polls – Who’s up? Who’s down? And the politician who posts the most outrageous or inflammatory tweet is guaranteed wall-to-wall coverage that news cycle.

Over the past few weeks, as Donald Trump sucked all the air out of the Republican presidential primary, we have seen how desperately other candidates behave just to get some attention. Take Rand Paul’s commercial featuring him wielding a chain saw on the tax code. Or Lindsey Graham’s video showing him destroying his cell phone after Trump released his number.

Worse: as The Hill newspaper reported, ““Ted Cruz has found a way to seize the spotlight at a time his campaign for president is losing the battle for buzz.” He did so on the floor of the US Senate, calling Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar. Gov. Rick Perry said the solution to recent shootings like the one in Louisiana was to make sure other movie patrons brought their guns to the theater. Mike Huckabee denounced Obama’s Iran deal saying, “It will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” He dominated the next news circle by doubling down on the comment.

Of course the new poster boy for using the modern media to register high poll number is Donald Trump. The Washington Post summed it up in a headline: “Why is Trump Surging? Blame the Media.” It went on to report that Trump has “consistently attracted 20-30 percent of the news coverage” of all the Republican candidates for president.

We are witnessing a cynical master of the game of politics, with hardly a trace of substance. Politico asked, “What does Donald Trump really believe on policy?” and answered, “ It’s hard to tell – his campaign will identify no policy director, he has no ‘issues’ tab on his campaign website and he hasn’t given any substantive policy speeches on the campaign trail.”

The Democratic primary is far less contentious, but the coverage of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is also light on policy differences and heavy on the ups and downs of polls, Hillary’s email problems, and the size of Sanders’ crowds.

Unless we intend to elect an entertainer-in-chief, there is something very wrong with how the media is covering politics these days. A healthy skepticism about our elected leaders is a good thing, and has been part of our political landscape at least since the Jefferson-Adams campaign in 1800. But our democracy cannot in the long term survive an all-pervasive, corrosive cynicism among the electorate.

We all want a free press. We are all willing to put up with its excesses. But we deserve something more than coverage of politics as a game. It is way past time for the media to begin to focus attention on candidates who want to engage in a national debate about the serious issues that confront us.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. Senator from Delaware.