I’ve been trying to figure out the media’s role in the presidential election. Sure, the media’s job is to provide the electorate enough information to make an informed decision when voting but nowadays in our new media age, their role has become more than that. They’ve become much more involved. They influence things because it benefits them to stir the pot to make the race as interesting as possible, even in a year when the race is interesting enough without their help. An interesting race sells more papers and commercials.

For tv especially, the race has been a godsend. The almost weekly primaries have been the only thing new on tv for the last 3 months. Personally, I think that the media has treated the primary contest much like they would a reality TV show. Think of every reality based contest tv show out there…Survivor, The Amazing Race, American Idol, etc. Every episode is the same. In the middle of the contest there is a “twist” thrown in by the show’s producer to even out the competition and make the show more interesting to watch. Obama goes on a primary winning streak and for Hillary it turns out to be a non-elimination round. Huckabee wins a couple of southern primaries and all of the sudden he is the Sanjia of the Republican Party- a candidate everyone knows can’t win the election but keeps in the race because he is entertaining to watch.

Just when the momentum and lead favors one candidate the media focuses on a comment made by a spouse, or advisor, or treats new polling data as a word from God to help keep the contest tight. The campaigns know that they do this so they feed the media anything that will benefit their campaign and the media reports on it giving them a hot new story. This system benefits every involved, except the voters who end up losing sight of the issues at hand and become absorbed by a presidential race that ends up looking like Survivor. The next big primary is Pennsylvania and no matter what the outcome is be sure that the media will do their part to make sure that no one is voted off the island. The race for the Democratic nominee needs to stay close until sweeps week which for the news media will be the Democratic Convention in August.