"Bush Outlines Re-election Agenda" is the headline MSNBC gives this AP article.
Set aside the dubious use of the word "re-election" there and read the article itself.
It makes no mention of a second-term "agenda." None. It contains no "outline." It doesn't even mention one or suggest that the president has an agenda that might be outlined.
It's a horse-race piece — all sizzle, no steak. It's possible, I suppose, that President Bush, at this campaign stop, did in fact "outline" an agenda for a second term. (And if he did so this would be big news — it would be the first time he's come forward with such details.) But if he did, the article makes no mention of it.
Stories like this one tell us next to nothing about the choice facing us in November. Nothing new about that, of course — mainstream media coverage of political campaigns always seem to prefer style over substance, the horse-race over the issues, the special effects over the plot.
Paul Krugman notes that this kind of flaccid coverage weakens our democracy:
In short, the triumph of the trivial is not a trivial matter. The failure of TV news to inform the public about the policy proposals of this year's presidential candidates is, in its own way, as serious a journalistic betrayal as the failure to raise questions about the rush to invade Iraq.
He's right. And I wholly agree that journalists have a responsibility to pay more attention to substance than to showmanship in a presidential campaign.
My point here though is simply to ask for truth in advertising. Don't give me Entertainment Weekly and pretend it's Foreign Affairs.
And don't give me a boilerplate article on a made-for-media event with a rehash of rehearsed soundbites and tell me it's an "outline" of a candidate's "agenda."
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