by Zach Bigalke

Created on: June 11, 2007   Last Updated: March 19, 2008

The press does not pick presidents...but I begin this with a caveat to that statement. The press may not have the deciding ballot in who becomes president, but it does ensure that someone other than the most-qualified candidate for the presidency takes up residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For whatever reason, the press focuses more on looks, superficial statements and public attitudes than on substantive issues and proposed policies. In recent debates (themselves a push to get candidates' faces to the public sooner while simultaneously soft-serving every vanilla question possible) more emphasis in the post-debate analysis has been on HOW a politician speaks, rather than WHAT they are speaking.

Case in point: two politicians are at the Republican debate. One rails on about how Iraq would have been prevented if only International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, under the auspices of the United Nations, had gone into Saddam's nation and failed to discover weapons of mass destruction. The other erroneously declares that day Ronald Reagan's birthday. Who do you think was reamed harder in the war room after the panel discussion?

We seem as a society to care little about politics, though it is politics which sway our nation on its current unsteady course. Voting to many young Americans comes at the end of an American Idol episode, through the magic of cellular text messaging. Polling places carry little of the allure they once did for this nation's citizens. And those who do head to the voting cubicles across the country do so with less concrete information on each candidate's merits and flaws than ever before.

Average Americans know more about the sex lives of potential chief executives than they do about their track records. This is entirely the fault of the press. As the "Fourth Estate" continues to guide American minds away from the policies which govern our nation and closer to picking our leaders based on hairstyle and sound bites, the role of journalists is cheapened to the point of obsolescence. The press is free to put out there whatever it wishes about our candidates; and until more Americans decry the senseless "information" pandered by these "journalists", the press will continue to offer little real data by which to steer our nation on a pragmatic course.

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