In Georgia for 36 hours and I know less now about what is happening in the election in this state and around the country than on Monday night when I landed.
When I go to broadcast news sources to find out what’s happening in the election. There’s very little news but lots of opinion. My diet is eclectic. In whatever under $100 a night motel room I’m staying in (and they are damned hard to find, inflation is still a bitch in the US) I flip between Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, even Bloomberg. In the car there are NPR and stations whose call letters I don’t catch as I go down the road.
Not much news on any of them but lots of opinion. Often these opinions are about a world these outlets do not provide basic, ground-level reported information about to their audience.
There are no longer newspaper stands because people who read papers for the most part now do so online, but even there the home pages — the shop window display of any paper — emphasize opinion because opinion drives clicks and clicks set the ad rates and ads pay the bills.
All kinds of opinion: expert opinion and public opinion.
This morning’s eyecatch at top of the home page of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, AJC.com, is a public opinion poll:
Opinion masquerading as news. This particular poll is not even surprising as news or opinion. Trump and his team failed on January 6th, 2021 to stop Congress certifying his defeat but with help from pro-Trump propaganda outlets the idea that the election was stolen has become embedded in his supporters minds.
Reporting/journalism on this should not rely on something as transient as opinion, rather it would be a story about people already planning to do something about it. Intimidation is happening at electoral boards around Georgia. Find the intimidators, go into chatrooms, locate people organizing to “Stop the Steal” again.
Maybe there are Georgia Democrats planning for what happens if, as seems likely, Kamala Harris wins the popular vote but fails, as is possible, to win the Electoral College. Why not just find them and report on their activities?
Because opinion is easier and cheaper. Yesterday I was on the road for a couple of hours, jet-lagged and taking care of little things, listening mostly to WABE, NPR’s Atlanta station. (ABE stand for Atlanta Board of Education).
The output was mostly opinion about opinion, even the NPR newscasts were driven by opinion polls. Yesterday’s opinions were about polling showing African-American men are not 100% in favor of Kamala Harris. This is a fact. But not all facts are news. Sometimes facts are a continuation of history.
The late Georgia governor Lester Maddox was a segregationist but also attracted some Black voters. The late Alabama governor George Wallace was also a segregationist who attracted some Black voters.
Is there a story or an NPR-style conversation (although there’s too much conversation there now, which may explain why my former employer is hemorraghing listeners) to be had in the historical comparison with Black support for Donald Trump? Yes. Maybe discussing the continuity between a small portion of Black voters supporting men from Maddox to Trump would be interesting and yield some insights that would help listeners understand that human beings cannot be easily shoe-horned into public opinion narratives.
“Low information voters” is a term that has come into use over the last three decades. Usually it is applied to people who don’t follow the news but take in opinion on talk radio, usually of a right-wing variety.
But as the news business has increasingly come to rely on opinion and opinion polling as a primary component of their output, the idea of “low-information voters” now covers the entire political spectrum. Americans live in an information desert and this is an underlying cause of polarization.
Anyway here’s my opinion after 36 hours back in my native land:
There is no longer a left or right, in America. There is no center. There are no longer the categories beloved of opinion pollsters and low information opinion columnists at New York Times (and imitators) op-ed: White, Black, Hispanic, other; Male/Female/other; College/non-college; Ancient/Boomer/GenX, Millennial, GenZ; Suburban/urban/rural; Evangelical/traditional Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu/Buddhist/Sikh/Jain.
There is just pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
Check back with me tomorrow, if I come across actual reported factual information on the election I may, like John Maynard Keynes, change my mind.
This is the first of my dispatches from Georgia and North Carolina. Both states are critical to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s hopes of winning the election. And both are competitive according to opinion polls but, as you can tell, I prefer to gather my own facts.
I plan to stay here through the counting of the vote, which promises to be fraught, particularly in Georgia but I need your financial help to do it. Here’s how:
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