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Why do American ballots have more than two choices, when the news media has spent their time pretending there are only two? (programming.dev)

submitted 4 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When you get your ballot and there's 10 choices but all year the media pretends there's only two, that should tell you something's seriously broken

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

The news media are for-profit. They are selling you entertainment masquerading as information. In this endeavor, they focus on two major things:

Ratings, really just how they can make money through ad revenue.
Branding and access. Every news media outlet projects an "angle" or "style" meant to be appealing to a subset of the "market".

What they are covering is party duopoly horse race politics. Others have said that one of the two parties winning is a foregone conclusion, but they have not considered their own participation in this "inevitability", nor how the media does its part to ensure it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, really just a means of control and self-disempowerment that is only maintained by political miseducation. And this is before we get to the misconception that political power and engagement is simply how you vote.

The horse race politics aspect serves both of news media's main interests. It gets ratings from the couch-dwelling partisans who get to feel like they are watching a battle between their good side and the other evil side. And often from a brand that confirms that they are the good side of good people. To do this most effectively they need access, they need entertaining figures representing the party duopoly. When they spend time on third parties they either slot it into this framework so that representatives of the duopoly can share their PR strategy against them or they are very short pieces for color (this is rare).