What’s the election about?…
Are the 2006 mid-term elections about President Bush or about a “choice between candidates.” Common sense (Warning: a cultural sound bite that hides power relationships to the benefit the powerful) says elections are always about choice, but let me suggest that the press should frame this election, and all others, far differently. What if elections were about governance and its effects on the lives of citizens? That’s what I call “telling a different story”–the story of citizens’ lives with citizens as protagonists (blog essay here and academic essay here).
Framing an election as a contest between politicians and political factions ignores the very purpose of government: To form and then run a more perfect union. Politics is the engine for deciding who gets to govern, what form government will take, and what “perfect” means. Governance is the production and implementation of policy, which has some effect in the world. It is precisely the effect, caused by the politicians, that ought to be the news peg for stories about the lives of citizens.
It’s called political utility, i.e. information we can actually use to make civic life work.
What I just described is very hard work demanded by the ethical standards journalists set for themselves in, for example, the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. Horse-race and inside-baseball coverage is unethical. But it’s easy. So never mind.
