People Tune Out

Yglesias argues that the media's tendency to focus on meaningless campaign stories does not, in the end, have a huge impact on election outcomes. I tend to have a more nuanced view of this.

I agree that most voters could not care less what Gen. Wesley Clark said or didn't say about John McCain's military service, no matter how much press coverage it gets. There are just too many big issues on voters' minds, from $4.00/gallon gas to the country's two wars. And as Sean over at FiveThirtyEight points out, there's new evidence courtesy of the Pew Research Center that proves just how irrelevant these stories are. Here's the key chart, tracking the percentage of Democrats, Republicans and Independents who followed campaign news "very closely" over the last 17 months:

Sean notes that the "very close" public interest dropped sharply (10-15% for all three blocs) around the time of the Bittergate remarks and the Jeremiah Wright stories in mid-March. Sean writes:

Counterintuitively for those who voraciously consume political news and have an emotional investment in the outcome, just when it seems like everything is becoming Urgent with a capital U because of some particular story, that very well may be when the aggregate of millions are tuning out.

So it's true that voters generally pay less attention to the media when the press coverage gets nasty, thereby limiting the media narrative's affect. But there's also an important role that the media should perform, and that is informing voters. When the voting public tunes out the press, the result, I imagine, is an uninformed public, not exactly the calling card of a healthy democracy.