Once again, the speculation runs rampant over reasons why one presidential candidate or the other has slipped or advanced in the polls. I could accept this most easily during the debates, since these imaginary facts serve nicely to add dramatic tension and narrative depth to the story news agencies wish to sell the public; shifts in polling numbers help “raise the stakes” of the debates by amplifying any perceivable effects on the public. What none of these news agencies bother to say is that most of the time, the margin between Kerry and Bush in any particular voter poll tends to fall within the polling agency’s margin of error. Journalists – with pressing deadlines and corporate managers who value profit more than accuracy – apparently feel compelled to make somethings out of nothing. It would seem that ambiguity and uncertainty don’t really sell.
With each passing day, it feels as if the body politic is asleep, and the news media have taken over its dreams. I’ve always felt that performative arts – particularly mass media – constitute an imagination for our collective identity (our body politic, if you will). But the stream-of-consciousness associations that drive the day-to-day speculations about causes (before effects have been clarified or verified) and consequences (for events or choices that have been, at best, imagined by reporters and pundits) now appear so distant from verifiable experience that I’m left feeling as though the voice of the press is content to wander freely … through possibility … without sensing any need to wake up, and look at what we actually know.
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