Mitt Romney and Barack Obama participate in the first Presidential Debate. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/GettyImages)
Well,
it's over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably
win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt
Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up
with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face. But it's not so much
the result that matters – it's the quiet.
What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy
and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars
are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on
both sides. A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful
research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves
two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic
media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in
between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous
and literally divides families.
Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to
take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the
name of election coverage. At this very moment, there are people all
over the country who are stocking up on canned goods and ammo for the
apocalypse they believe will come if Obama is re-elected. For the
broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely
interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute
state
about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to
watch what happens next. And any person who's been subjected to 720
consecutive days of propaganda is not likely to take the news well if he
gets the wrong result, whether it's a victory for Obama or for Romney.
By that point, the networks have spent two years finding new ways each
day to convince him that the world is going to disintegrate into some
commie or Hitlerian version of
Mad Max, to keep him coming back and watching ads.
The campaign should start and finish in six weeks, and there should
be free TV access to both candidates. And it should be illegal to
publish poll numbers. This isn't as crazy as it sounds – they actually
had such a law in Russia while I lived there, and people were much
happier. (Well, they were still miserable, because they were Russian,
but at least they weren't stressing about poll numbers.) Think about it:
Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the
issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the
entire story – I
can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go
completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if
they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't
centered on who was winning. That's the dirtiest secret we in the media
have kept from you over the years: Most of us suck so badly at our jobs,
and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that
we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn't
have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences. Can you imagine
if your favorite news network had to do stories like, "What is the
Overseas Private Investment Corporation up to, and what do each of the
candidates think about it?" That would be like asking Nineties-era
baseball players to take the field without popping greenies – what, you
mean play the game
sober? Half the on-air talent would have to resign, or do ad work hawking reverse mortgages.
It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly
valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more
qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of
control, it's become bigger than the presidency itself. In every race
there are now not two but three dominating figures – the Democrat, the
Republican and The Process, and we're raising whole generations who hate
The Process far more than they like either of the candidates. Mainly
for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay
wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment,
indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone. In
doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote. If
The Process is so clearly wrong, how right can the candidates be?
If we did this right, people would come out of presidential elections
exhilarated, maybe even stoked to get involved in their local races for
county sheriff or D.A. (Such races would likely have more of an impact
on their day-to-day lives: For the most part, when it comes to our daily
routines, the president might as well be on Mars.) Instead, most of us
come out of the election exhausted, in desperate need of a couple of
Ambiens and determined to spend the next two years buried in Hulu
reruns, afraid to even
pass a news channel while couch-surfing our way to
Storage Wars or a Lifetime movie.
What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the
way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every
move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in
Washington. And that's a shame, because feeling optimistic shouldn't
require turning off the TV or tuning out The Process. What we are
witnessing, after all, is the world's greatest contest for power, an
amazing fairy tale full of iconic moments that we'll watch no matter how
much Sean Hannity or Chris Matthews screams at us. But it would be
awesome, next time, if we could find a way to turn down the volume.
© 2012 Rolling Stone
As
Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's
predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S.
Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal
Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.
