The Politico-Media Complex Will Tell You About Paul Ryan's Abs, Not Arctic Ice Melt

A rational person would assume that the fact that the ice covering one of the Earth’s two poles has melted away to the lowest levels ever recorded — and is slated to continue shrinking at a rapid clip, thanks to global climate change — would be bigger news than one man’s particular workout regimen. But the politico-media complex in the United States is far from rational.

In their widely-cited study, The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media, Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald Shaw write that “In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position.”

This is typically applied to the issues that come to dominate the campaign itself — issues like the economy, immigration, and civil liberties. So it also applies to what the mass media chooses to leave out; in this case, climate change.

It’s not just the blatant, anti-science bias at News Corp., it’s a pervasive shifting of focus within the industry. Media Matters did some research on this front, and it discovered an alarming but not-even-slightly surprising trend: Our mass media has heaped coverage on things as trivial as vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s trendy P90X workout routine,

while scarcely mentioning the global warming-driven record melting in the Arctic.

[Which, by the way, is melting scary fast — for further help in comprehending just how fast, see these crazy animations and visualizations.]

But according to the data, TV news outlets covered Ryan’s workout three times more than Arctic ice sea loss. From the report:

Since June, the major TV news outlets have devoted seven full segments to Paul Ryan’s physical fitness and P90X workout routine, and only one to Arctic sea ice loss. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have each covered Paul Ryan’s workout routine as much or more than Arctic sea ice loss. In total, TV outlets have discussed Ryan’s fitness 66 times — more than three times as much as Arctic sea ice.

They made a silly graphic to accompany those findings,

And a less silly one to show that cable news was even worse — it mentioned the fitness routine six times as much as the shrinking Arctic.

The takeaway is clear. Our politico-media complex revels in transforming whatever scraps either campaign is willing to toss their way into “human interest” stories or into talking points that will dominate the day’s newscast. Anyone who watches these broadcasts is well aware that there’s precious little reportage taking place. It’s just an endless stream of punditry and the occasional puff piece weaved together from some newly surfaced detail.

Which means that unless either of the campaigns are talking about the melting Arctic — something neither candidate is eager to do — that sad little fact just doesn’t make it into the big election-year news cycle. You see how this works, in terms of McCombs and Shaw’s thesis: the media could choose to make the melting Arctic into a campaign issue, to pursue what is, in reality, one of the most stunning, important stories of our time. But it doesn’t.

It’s too in thrall to the story the campaigns are willing to tell them. You could imagine an entire dramatic NBC segment: “The Arctic is Melting at a Record Rate, Yet Obama and Romney Stay Mum” that would be provocative and even ratings-generating — in an alternate universe. There’s too much witting or unwitting collusion between media and the campaigns to stray that far from the narrative.

The PMC’s agenda has been set: It’s Mitt Romney’s wealth and unlikeability versus Barack Obama’s general re-election “challenges”; assessing the efficacy of stump speeches, conventions, and debates; and, in the background, foreign policy and the economy. And, yes, dumb personal interest stories about the candidates like the Paul Ryan and his super-abs. The mass media has worked out its narratives and chosen where it will seek to squeeze drama out of those narratives. Little else will eke its way out during the election season save truly breaking news. And it appears that a catastrophically melting Arctic doesn’t qualify.