How Come Political News Isn’t News?

I have been an obsessive and daily follower of the political media since I first listened to my father read the daily op-eds in the newspaper when he came home from work and sat in his easy chair in the living room waiting for my mother to announce that ‘dinner was served.’

My father read the political op-eds because he would then launch into a brief response to each statement by the newspaper’s editorial board, even though Daddy’s entire audience consisted of me. My older brother couldn’t be bothered to listen, my younger siblings were too young to know or care.

But I was 13 or 14, and from that time until now, which is somewhere around 65 years ago, I have been hooked into the way media reports political news.

Of course, even though the same two parties make the political news which made the political news 65 years ago, the political media has certainly changed. Now, the newspaper that my father used to read (The New York Times) has been subsumed by 24–7 television networks, endless websites, and social media, all of which manage to take a few daily facts or events and turn them into content which can either by read or watched virtually 24 hours a day.

What this means is that the demand for political news goes far beyond the number of events which actually occur in the political realm every day. So, what…