During Wednesday night’s presidential debate, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney inspired the country by bridging the partisan divide to say, “Shut up, Jim Lehrer.”
Lehrer, a former PBS news anchor, was, needless to say, completely ineffectual. The candidates, not Lehrer, dictated the timing and topic. Though he desperately tried to get the candidates to distinguish themselves from one another, he failed.
The debate was utterly stale. For an hour and a half, Obama and Romney waxed wonky about taxes and health care. Even a college student, hardened by two”“ and even four”“hour lectures, would have been hard-pressed to follow the debate with rapt attention.
But the problem was not Lehrer. It was not even the American attention deficit, though that epidemic wreaks its own disasters. The problem is that the American political media frames the race such that only certain issues get any limelight and only certain viewpoints get any credence.
College students, you are the solution.
As Generation Y tweets and tumbles its way into the future, the power of the mainstream media is quickly eroding. Media-literate youth can wrest the communications monopoly away from the people that brought you Jim Lehrer’s political farce.
I’d like to start right now, in the form of a letter:
Dear candidates,
You are hereby invited to attend a live, interactive web debate. From the comfort of your respective offices, you will be joined by thousands of college students tuning in online. There will be no on-screen moderator. Viewers will determine the questions and issues. We ask, you answer.
Jim Lehrer can go back to retirement.
The two-ring circus that the media is running, with Obama and Romney as its dancing elephants, is neither productive nor educational. It’s simply a sideshow.
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, conspicuously absent at the debate, tweeted, “Romneycare. Obamacare. Po-tay-to. Po-tah-to. No matter what you call it, it’s still the same thing.”
Johnson’s inspired tweet can be generalized to encompass the race in general. Romney’s po-tay-to is answered by Obama’s po-tah-to. Romney wants to energize the middle class? So does Obama! Obama wants to up America’s energy production? What do you know, so does Romney!
Yet one can hardly blame the candidates, each of whom is saying exactly what he needs to in order to woo America’s electorate. The media, which sets the terms of the conversation, should be taken to task for the echo chamber it has created.
Political science Professor John Zaller said the media has the ability to determine the victor of a debate.
“Someone wanting to predict the winner of a presidential debate as reflected in polls would be best advised not to watch the debate at all and instead to watch the media commentary on it,” said Zaller.
A media with the power to pick winners has too much power. New communication technologies such as microblogging and instant polling have the potential to strip from conventional corporate news outlets their monopoly on the nation’s discourse.
As it turns out, political scientists at UC Davis and other universities across the country have been working on just such a technology. For the first time on Wednesday night, nearly 4,000 people reacted to the debate on a real-time polling application co-developed by a Davis professor.
The technology promises to bring the candidates and their audiences ever closer together.
Technologies developed in the last 10 years can turn the media into some semblance of a democracy. You and I, rather than executives at CNN and FOX, can set the terms of the debate, both literally and metaphorically.
Three years ago, Twitter helped bring a revolution to Iran. Today, in the barren political landscape of the United States, it’s time for a Twitter revolution of our own.
It’s time to throw up barricades, not in the streets but on the information highway.
Email Arom at darom@media.ucla.edu or tweet him @Eitan_Arom. Send general comments to opinion@media.ucla.edu or tweet us @DBOpinion.