Americans are 'tuning out' political news. Why shouldn't they?

All right, I'll bite. Here's an Associated Press story from political journalism's always-large navel gazing pile: This one reports that after an election season notable for its vapidity and the reelection of a sedition-backing convicted felon as national leader, Americans are turning away from reading and watching political news.

Television ratings — and now a new poll — clearly illustrate the phenomenon. About two-thirds of American adults say they have recently felt the need to limit media consumption about politics and government because of overload, according to the survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Smaller percentages of Americans are limiting their intake of news about overseas conflicts, the economy or climate change, the poll says. Politics stand out.

If you can work your way through the pop-ups and ads for sketchy if not outright scammy alleged health cures on the official Associated Press site, you'll be rewarded with not much. Some anecdotes, a few sheepish notes about how this isn't unusual after an election and is typically temporary, some quotes from Average Americans who might or might not be representative of a single damn thing, and we're done. But the takeaway news is that a large majority of Americans are now turning away from media coverage about politics due to quote-unquote "overload," and here's the question I'm going to pose in response to that:

Yeah? Why shouldn't they? Isn't that precisely what the media has itself been telling them to do?

What benefit have Americans gained, these past ten years now, by following America's corporate-produced media coverage? What can they do about it? Is it news they can "use", or is it a collection of stories that will proceed along their designated courses with not a damn thing any non-wealthy, non-connected American can do about it—a collection of claims, lies, scandals, and spin that will be shouted about today but which journalism's own history proves won't be remembered or even mentioned six weeks or three months or one year from now?

There's the catch, and it's both one of the main reasons democracy is in shambles and the reason Americans can be forgiven for believing their own investment in politics has been a fool's game all along. For at least a decade now, a single theme has dominated nearly all of politics and political coverage alike, and with Trump's arrival on the scene and his willingness to say all the unsaid parts out loud it became the mantra that our leaders and captured press have drilled into our heads at the beginning, middle, and end of every new scandal and cycle:

None of this matters.

None of it.

Nothing a political figure says truly matters. No claim they make matters. No promise, no pledge, no boundary, no act, no crime, no hidden secret, no horror—none of it matters. None of it matters, and if the media has one role in the America of the 2020s, it has been to present an unending stream of self-important, well-connected "analysts" tasked mostly with mocking all the Americans who thought that it might. That is the new purpose of the press; that is the handshake deal made between every powerful figure. Nothing that can be dubbed "political" matters, not even a little bit, and everything can be brushed off as "political."

Of course Americans are tuning out political news, then. The Associated Press, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every other media outlet has spent ten years now pushing stories into the public eye and then tittering at anyone who has the audacity to get invested in or actually be angered by any of it. In New Journalism, all of it is scenes flitting by on a screen, and all of it is for entertainment value only, not for rendering judgment or determining truth. Those who believe any of it should have consequences are considered fools; those who remember any of it after the current news cycle has ended are considered obsessives. Look at those voters, they say, the ones that care about issues. Those aren't what true Americans look like.

None of this stuff we're reporting on, sneer the op-eds and studio hosts, matters.

Think back on this election cycle, the one that Americans are now distancing themselves from even though the most important part of it, the part where we all Find Out, has not even begun. Name one part of the election that mattered—a truth that stayed true from any one month to the next. A thing that was true last spring, and still true on election day many months later, and which voters were expected to give a damn about that whole long time.

In the beginning months of the year, Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. It didn't matter. None of the coverage thought that a presidential candidate being convicted of nearly three dozen felonies mattered in the race, not once the first headlines had been printed up, shoved into the public eye, and got promptly buried under new news cycles. The now president elect spent the whole election cycle awaiting sentencing and possible prison time; it didn't matter. Nobody in "political journalism" cared. Few of the politicians they covered were willing to go out on the big stout limb of saying that a man on his way to prison probably shouldn't be given the power to thwart the law and pardon himself.

You were considered a fool for caring—not wanting a yet-to-be-sentenced felon to be president was now a partisan take, not an ethical one. And you were an enormous fool at that, because if sending a rioting mob to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to block Congress and your own Vice President from acknowledging your election loss is not something that matters, in our news coverage, then surely you would be stupid to think that a lifetime of petty financial crimes would.

What rhetoric from that long campaign trail mattered? What did voters think they were voting for? What did they cite, as the lynchpin promises that earned their votes—did they hear any of those promises from the press, or only from the buzzing in their own heads?

Did Americans vote for a hostile takeover of Greenland? No, that never came up, not even once in the whole election cycle. Did they vote for rich white nationalist Elon Musk to orchestrate new administration policies while clinging to Donald Trump's earlobe? There was no platform that mentioned it. Did Americans vote for concentration camps? No, we were told quite explicitly that none of the signage mattered, that everything being reported on throughout the whole of the campaign was all just a game to be played, and that you were a rube to believe he was serious. Promising to jail his opponents was "just riling up the news," we were told in reports premised and predicated on the widespread presumption that not a word of it mattered.

There was not one campaign promise on either side of the aisle that was presented as consequential; there was not one that a reader or a viewer could believe without being presented with a newer, more urgently reported claim suggesting they were stupid if they did. You could have gone through the last four years reading and watching zero political news, not a single thing, and the odds are nine in ten that you wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference in what you knew or thought you did. You would know exactly as much about the economy, and about political scandals that were real, and about ones that were entirely invented, and about what some podcaster with cookie-dough brains said about so-and-so or such-and-such.

After the election, and not before it, we learned that a sitting Member of Congress had allegedly raped a Florida high school student.

We were not supposed to know this. If it were up to the cultish and in-your-face supposed "Christian" acting as House Speaker, none of us would have ever known of it because in Mike Johnson's view, whether or not one of his party's most visible figures raped a high school student is not something that should matter, not once his colleague orchestrated a new plan to step aside in a last-ditch effort to cover it up. This was just one incident in a 4-year spree of party-hopping, drug use and sex trafficking, a pattern that many of his colleagues knew about because he wasn't shy about showing them the pictures, which we also knew and which also, we were told repeatedly, didn't matter.

So public ethics no longer matter, and the journalists covering the story would sneer at you if you thought that they might because the entirety of Trump's last term of office consisted of Trump doing things the rest of us widely understood to be unethical or illegal while the most powerful Senators and the sweatiest House members in the nation all stood up and gave speeches about how not a single one of those scandals mattered and the real outrage was that Trump was being "attacked" by government officials and public scolds who kept exposing it all. By the time Trump was impeached for the second time, this time for an attempted coup, you would be hard pressed to find anyone in the media who still cared about any of the four years' worth of past scandals. None of it came up.

In a single media generation we went from a politics in which powerful conservatives wrote pompous children's books about morality to a new version in which powerful conservatives can take drugs and rape high schoolers and stand a very good chance of their colleagues burying the evidence of it, and the defining thing we know about this new national trajectory is that we, the public, are now considered stupid for believing the change might matter.

Well, what about the rule of law, then?

Of course it doesn't matter. To follow media discourse is to be exposed to a nonstop drumbeat of explanations as to why laws Do Not Fucking Matter, they most certainly do not, not when anyone rich ends up on the wrong side of one. It is the defining proclamation of our times. The Department of Justice is sure of it. Our Congress is sure of it. The very rich people in charge of the less rich people put on television to explain those laws to us are only sure of it—the notion has been carved into their very souls.

People died in Trump's coup attempt—and for him, there were no laws that mattered. Trump was indicted for hoarding classified secrets in his for-profit damn club, and for moving the documents and lying to federal agents in his attempts to keep them—and you were proven a fool, if you thought it might matter. The only case that moved far enough along for a verdict to be reached resulted in 34 felony convictions—and the message of all the political coverage after the news cycle that announced it was that a presidential candidate's status as felon awaiting sentencing didn't matter, and after the felon won his race we were told by the courts and Department of Justice alike that the 34 convictions didn't matter, and if the press mentioned any of it at all it was only to remind you, American citizen, that you were were stupid if you thought it was going to be different.

Should Americans follow "legal coverage" of their Supreme Court, then? Why? How will any damn bit of it matter, when the Supreme Court's own stance is that Actually, not a bit of the last 200 years of history matters as a predictor of what the law will be tomorrow? Oh look, it turns out presidents are allowed to commit crimes now—our founders were stupid for believing that would lead to corruption. Judges are allowed to accept gratuities now; how petty of us to have thought they ought not to.

If you are a good American and eat your media vegetables and follow politics as you should, you may learn that the three Supreme Court justices most notorious for secretly accepting trips and gifts from billionaires just happen to be the three justices whose judicial "philosophies" were and are most notorious for flipping head-for-tail when powerful people have come before the court to ask for outcomes their own past rulings can't support.

And we are told that those two things are coincidence, and that the judges are nothing but big good-natured sacks of consummate integrity so neither story much matters. We are told this by the media figures hired to report on the court's dealings and by the justices themselves, in their appearances before special interest groups, and we are told that we are in the wrong for connecting the stories together and suspecting something is afoot because, as the Chief Justice will himself assure you while sporting his big black robe, it is very nearly a betrayal of the rule of law to even suggest such a thing. No, the legal correspondents and the political correspondents (but these are the same thing now, having been consolidated into the nothing matters division) are all certain. These are all neat little stories for momentary consumption—and none of them matter.

So why should Americans read this coverage, all of it explaining that the rule of law became something different today and will probably change again tomorrow? Is there a damn thing anyone without a billion dollars can do about it? No? Are we even allowed to protest it? No again?

When abortion is banned nationwide, which is a thing that will happen because the same political figures who spent the last month telling us that it's none of our business if Members of Congress rape high schoolers have vowed that it will happen no matter what laws may stand in the way, is there any coverage any American could have read leading up to the decision that will have meaningfully warned them it was likely to happen? Or will it come like Trump's new claims on Greenland, a new story out of the blue, likely premised on some inanity that's both so absurdly ahistorical as to be an outright lie and presented in a legal about-face seemingly arranged out of refrigerator word magnets?

Tell me, will any of the coverage include explanations of what Americans might do about it? Or will it instead be fully premised on all of you being naive and stupid during all those long years in which you cared, and being even more naive and stupid now for caring about what will happen next?

Pregnancy related deaths are skyrocketing in anti-abortion states. Tell me, does any of the "political coverage" care? Are any of the media hosts outraged? Are they demanding answers? Or is it just a thing that has happened, a new normal you are already expected to be used to, one that you will be mocked for, if you ask about it three months from now after it has been dutifully reported and become old news?

What about the news that comes every year now, announcing that each newly closed-out year has been the hottest in modern history and that climate changes are now so pronounced that you, yes you, probably are struggling to find any disaster insurance company still willing to take your business?

The whole of the climate crisis doesn't matter now. The reason it doesn't matter is, in fact, simple: corporations pushing speculative artificial intelligence platforms are now guzzling up so much energy that preventing catastrophic climate change is, now, impossible. We can't do without the technology that steals copyrighted works and hands out advice that ranges between wrong and genuinely deadly, we are told, and so "political coverage" has simply thrown up its hands and declared that preventing the catastrophes that more and more of us are living through do not, and will not, matter.

What about the Covid pandemic? It's still going on, you know; people are still dying in your town. What was the political takeaway of a million-plus Covid deaths and counting?

That one's easy. The "political coverage" has been explicit: None of those deaths matter. Nobody cares. You're stupid if you care. You're stupid if you think government has a role to play in preventing mass death. You're stupid if you think there's a difference between medical expertise and some carrion-pawing whale-decapitating shithead and crank who instead insists that it is vaccines, not disease, harming the country. You're stupid if you believe there is such a thing as expertise, or believe that some people's opinions are more valid than other people's opinions, or think that government should prefer expertise and ethics while shunning charlatans, self-dealers, and crooks.

Here is the short version: The near-entirety of political coverage in America now consists of the discovery of some new likely crisis or scandal, a slick and sneering figure standing at a podium to declare that none of it matters, six pundits shoved into a studio to nod at each other while explaining that the only reason it might ever matter is if some other politician can leverage the scandal into new words that the pundits think some imaginary American might care about, and then the pundits leave, the studio floor is swept clean and the desks re-polished, and the op-ed pages never mention it again.

That is how attempting to overthrow the government turns into it doesn't matter.

That is how 34 felonies turn into it doesn't matter.

That is how threats of internment camps, of violence, of theocracy, of criminality all turn into it doesn't matter.

It is not that the American public decided those things did not matter; the American public was told over and over, by the press, that those things did not matter and that anyone who cared about any of it was being even more political when they kept bringing it up.

And it is not because our media is lazy or indifferent. It is because the indifference is enforced. By God, we will make sure none of this matters, and we will make sure nobody in our company suggests to the public that it should. When The Washington Post sought to make a clear differentiation between (1) the presidential candidate who had orchestrated a violent insurrection targeting lawmakers, who had been convicted of 34 felonies, and who was under indictment for an assortment of federal and state crimes all related to his seemingly obsessive crookedness and (2) the presidential candidate who was not, the billionaire owner of the paper, Jeff Bezos, stepped in to block his paper from doing so.

Whether Trump is a convicted criminal, a seditionist, dementia-riddled, or promising an array of new crimes does not matter, was the order handed down; my captured paper must not close out the election by suggesting Americans ought to truly care.

The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times issued a similar edict, but has followed up by vowing further enforcement of his personal belief that lies, crimes, and scandals among the billionaire class do not matter and that journalism that might suggest otherwise ought to be rooted out.

So then: Why should Americans pay attention to "political reporting" if "political reporting" consists of nothing but a stream of unending abuse, a series of outrages that we were once told it was our duty to care about but which now, in current formulation, are quickly followed by a deluge of op-ed columns, sneering partisan quotes, and from-the-diner stories all proclaiming that real Americans don't give a flying damn about any of it and that there's something wrong with you if you do?

How many years need to go by in which journalists and politicians coordinate and agree that feh, not a single thing that has happened in politics truly ought to matter before Americans take them at their word and start believing that yes, reading what the newspapers write about our leaders and our issues is nothing but an exercise in impotent futility?

It would be one thing if it mattered. It would be one thing if a sitting Congressman could be accused of raping a high school student as he trolled drug-fueled parties and that information would make two shits worth of difference to any of the talking heads scrambling to get future interviews from him. It won't. None of those talking heads care. The Speaker of the House tried his damnedest to keep it covered up, he was so certain nobody should care. In previous decades there might be public scorn, if a coward tried to overthrow the government, rather than it being a petty partisan squabble with the pro-overthrow politicians sneering to the Sunday show hosts that the American thing to do is to respect such violence as the prerogative of our obvious betters and the Sunday hosts clamoring to get the accomplices to come on next week to brush off their next set of crimes as well.

There was once a broad understanding that the purpose of the free press was to act as check on political corruption. It went like this:

Political figures: Behave well or behave poorly.

The Press: Exposes politicians who abuse their office or commit crimes.

The Public: Acts on the information exposed to root out the abusers.

That is not the current arrangement. The current arrangement, which may or may not be the product of a media-corporate-political class in which careerists flit between watchdogs and watched as whims and opportunities dictate, is this:

Political figures: Nothing we say or do matters and only fools or zealots would think otherwise.

The Press: Nothing political leaders say or do matters and only fools or zealots would think otherwise.

The Public: Nothing the media reports on matters and only fools or zealots think otherwise.

This was not organic. It started in politics, with a new class of crooks and near-crooks who intentionally sought to dismantle public approbation of their behavior by insisting that disapproving of their acts amounted to "partisanship" by the reporters who did it—and that "real" journalism consisted of repeating "both sides" of partisan claims, rather than verifying which were true and which were meant to deceive.

The media then followed, agreeing that their watchdog status was secondary to their true calling, which was to repeat both sides of partisan claims while remaining circumspect on which claims were true and which were meant to deceive.

And the public, which does not have time in their busy lives for much of this shit and which wants all of it summarized into bites they have some plausible chance of getting the gist of, watched an entire generation of slick and vapid news voices tell them that nothing in politics matters for any period of time longer than three weeks or so and internalized it because the people on the glowing screens all sound so smug and so sure of themselves every time they say it.

The "political media" disemboweled themselves, they did it on purpose, and they did it so that the people who attempt coups and rape high schoolers wouldn't stop coming on their shows or returning their calls. So here we are.

I don't want to hear a single goddamn word about whether Americans have a duty to keep up with "political coverage" when even the reporters who report on politics think none of it matters and trot merrily off to report on the next scandal while pretending that none of the last ten ever happened. Americans have a duty to know what their government is saying and is doing. Americans have a duty to learn which political leaders are ethical and which are liars and crooks.

But "political coverage" won't tell them any of that, so damn straight they're going to go looking for it somewhere else. Yes, Americans are tuning out. And media executives who tell themselves those audiences are only staying away temporarily, in the aftermath of the least consequential and least informative election coverage their companies have ever produced, may be in for a rude surprise.