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We are twenty months from the 2020 election,
what if you heard from the media about the candidates?
Maybe you've heard about how likable they are or the odds they can win.
You probably haven't heard much about their plans to balance the budget.
This far out from the election, why are we even talking about polls,
why aren't we talking about policy?
On May 26, 2016,
I was working on a presidential campaign in our headquarter's office.
I was sitting at my desk working on briefing memos, the staff was excited that
day because at 2 o'clock our candidate was scheduled to give a big policy speech
about workers rights in Las Vegas, so we all wanted to watch on TV.
As 2 o'clock approached a group of the staff peeled away from their work and
huddled around office TVs which was set to all the major networks.
The clock ticked down, 1:58, 1:59, but
then 2 o'clock came and went, and none of the network showed that policy speech.
Instead, all of them showed that, that's a live feed of an empty podium at another
candidate's rally in North Dakota, waiting for that candidate to take the stage.
That cadidate was so great for
ratings that even that image drew people to the TV.
It was in that moment,
I thought there's a crisis with political media in this country.
It's not a republican democrat crisis, it's an American problem.
It's a problem of the trivial in our political media, where personality,
scandal and polling dominate the coverage,
because that's what generates ratings and profit.
I thought in that moment,
it's time to rethink the model of corporate political media.
Think back to the 2016 election,
what's the first news story that comes to mind for you about either candidate?
Raise your hand if that story was about policy, like economic or foreign policy.
Now raise your hand if that story was about personality, scandal, or
polling, like emails or Tweets, exactly.
In the 2016 election according to Harvard Kennedy School, 10% of the coverage was
about policy, two-thirds was about personality, scandal and polling.
The coverage of our elections has become a reality show, and as a viewer,
I'm part of the problem, we all are.
It's hard to turn off the TV or not click on the headline when it's sensationalized.
But imagine for a moment if our political media were free from profit pressures,
free to focus only on the stories they think the public really needs to know,
and free to pursue those stories with depth and with context.
Over the last few weeks, I've been looking at headlines about the 2020 candidates in
some of the leading news sites, here is the sampling of some of those headlines.
Kamala Harris' father criticizes her for marijuana joke,
Elizabeth Warren drinks a beer on Instagram live and gets mixed reaction.
Grass roots not grass feed, Cory Booker could be our first vegan president.
>> [LAUGH] >> In the pale of winter,
Trump's tan remains a state secret.
>> [LAUGH] >> What about TV,
if you turn on cable news in primetime, what do you see?
It's probably one of two things, it could be an opinion show,
where you have a partisan host delivering a cross between an op-ed and a newscast.
Or it could be a news show,
where you probably have a split-screen with a pundit on the left and
one on the right, talking past each other about the hot new controversy of the day.
At the bottom of the screen in capital letters it probably says, breaking news.
It's the same breaking news headline whether there's been a national disaster
or if a politician made a minor speaking geff.
So why should you care about this, and why now?
Because reliable information is an anchor of a functioning democracy and
we're drifting further and further from that anchor.
Let's think about the situation we're in, Americans are increasingly
uninformed three quarters can't name the three branches of government.
On top of that you've all heard about fake news,
there's a blurring of the line between truth and fiction in our news ecosystem.
An MIT study this year found that false news stories are 70% more
likely to get retweeted than real new stories.
There's even an emerging AI that can mass produce fake news making it that much
harder to detect and mitigate.
And finally less than half of the Americans trust the mass
media that's down from 70% in the 1970s.
In this context what will happen in the next national security emergency,
how we all agree on what's true?
We take for granted that our political media should be run, that it's ideal for
it to be run as subsidiaries of corporate giants.
But that system is largely failing at what its core mission should be,
to inform and educate.
What if we considered our political media to be a public good?
Set aside as something different from just another product in our economy.
Quality information is essential for people to make informed decisions,
it has benefits to our whole society.
There are already news nonprofits doing great work like ProPublica and NPR.
And you know what the most trusted institution in the entire country is?
PBS, we could take that model and
build a new generation of political media non-profits.
With a strictly non-partisan educational mission, and
with stable long term capital backing from foundations and small donors.
One day maybe yield run a company that owns media assets,
maybe you will be looking to invest for impact.
When you're in that position consider the media as part of life blood of
our democracy.
If you can be a force for
hiring journalists with a not-for-profit nonpartisan mission.
When news rooms are getting dessimated and
pushed towards the trivial, that's having impact.
And if you work at a social media company, you can help partner
with quality news organizations rather than sidelining and replacing them.
These are all long term ideas, how can you actually help today?
It's not realistic to resolve that we'll stop consuming infotainment all together.
But when we do consume it we could remind ourselves that it's entertainment,
not a replacement for real news.
The Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan has said that in an election,
the media treats policy like a helping of steamed broccoli,
shoved to the side of the plate.
Broccoli gets a bad rap but it's healthy and it's really important for
a balanced diet, maybe we can make a small pledge here today.
For every few stories we consume between now and 2020 about the political horse
race, we could try to find and real and maybe even share a story about policy.
In the strongest democracy in the world,
we can build a new landscape of political media.
A media we can be proud off that rises above the fray to deliver substance and
context.
You can help make that a reality, thank you.
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