According to the newspapers I read, we have "bad" political discourse. What does bad political discourse look like? It is a lot of yelling, and its language is inflammatory; Gov. Scott Walker being heckled at the State of the State speech comes to mind. Most importantly, the problem with a bad political discourse is that nothing gets done.
These complaints about our political discourse are relatively new, becoming prevalent only in the last decade. This leaves us with a question: Why is our political discourse so bad? I propose that it is bad because the people who report on politics like politics too much.
Looking at our political environment the biggest problem seems to be that it is unworkably polarized and partisan. If partisanship is a vice, it's a peculiar one indeed since people who are more informed about politics tend to be more partisan. This isn't to say that more extreme viewpoints are more correct. I think a better explanation is that people who put forth the effort to inform themselves about politics also tend to be interested in the game of politics. It may be a public service, but for smart people politics is really just a sport.
People who are more interested in politics are also more interested in national politics, either for the glamor, the importance or maybe for the vanity of a large audience. These are the people who are also most likely to write about politics, either in distinctively ideological magazines or in elite newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Then the Internet happened, and everyone could read about national politics and more importantly, everybody could write about national politics. Imagine you write for an online audience and you want to maximize your readership. As the political system that all Americans belong to, covering national politics is almost a no-brainer.
With a growing online audience, the political conversation grows as well. But the political conversation isn't growing outside of those people that already care about politics. The current media scene is very different now than in the golden age of broadcasting; instead of having to appeal to a wide audience, the consumption of news has become more specialized, making appealing to a diverse audience almost unnecessary. Imagine you're writing about politics again. If people that don't care very much about politics can and will avoid you, why should you bother appealing to them? Of course, you wouldn't. Similarly, political writing began to be written to and for political insiders, at the exclusion of everyone else.
So this is the story so far: Powered by the Internet, political discourse is increasingly dominated by national issues and is written by people who are themselves abnormally interested in politics. On top of this, political coverage is written in a way that appeals to political insiders, rather than a general audience. And on top of this, political insiders are more likely than outsiders to be explicitly partisan. What's going to happen here?
What happened to the political blogosphere should have been easy to predict-the partisan sides broke up with each other. As Tyler Cowen, blogging at Marginal Revolution, wonders, "[m]aybe some of us are simply a bit sick of each other, and the accumulated slights and misunderstandings weigh more heavily on our emotional responses than does the feeling of generosity from working together in the same ‘office.'" On the other hand, more objective political news sources are increasingly covering politics in the way that an insider wants it: Like a game. What they call "horse race" reporting-covering the day-to-day presidential public opinion polls, for example-has always existed, but it's certainly getting worse, especially with news sources like Politico written for political insiders obtaining national audiences. When politics is a horse race, partisan fighting is good. The outcome doesn't matter, because all that we care about is the drama of the game.
Think about sports reporting for a minute. It's certainly charged and is just as tribal as political reporting can be. But sports are merely entertainment; politics is supposed to be the way that the public serves itself. I could hope that political journalists would cover politics for everybody else, with more respect to its issues and less to its excitement. But I'm not holding my breath.
Zach Thomae is a freshman majoring in computer science. Tweet your thoughts to @dailycardinal.
