Benjamin Studebaker

If you look at any major American news website right now, the lead story (and in some cases nearly all the stories) will be about the 2016 election. This has been true for about a year, and we still have another 6 months or so until November. Initially it feels as if this election coverage is going somewhere useful–candidates choose to run on different issues, and that gets us talking about those issues and about the various policy proposals to deal with them. But as time goes on and the field narrows, the candidates stop throwing out new ideas and start going after each other in a prolonged trench war that is more about character attacks than it is about the issues. But this doesn’t bother readers–readers remain far happier to click on election-related content than on any other sort of content. Even reduced purely to soap opera, election politics beats nearly every other kind of politics. Media outlets have caught on to this–because you get more hits and clicks covering the election than you do covering anything else, the media is forced to supply you with an unending stream of political stories, many of which are repetitive and don’t contribute much of value to any sort of public debate, lest they lose market share to competitors.

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