Clinton and Media

With the elections for the Congress coming up in November in New York, one could ask if it’s really true. Is Hillary Clinton really running? Against who? For what position? While 2006 is considered like an “off-year” (no presidential elections), the medias seem to ignore or forget about those elections. Do they really? Leighley explains in his book “Mass Media and Politics” that media would talk about anything as long as people are interested. I remember from my American Politics class, Professor Pimpare saying how it was fascinating to observe that people could named you the name of the President but are incapable to remember who their U.S. House of Representative is. In the end of the day, he does much more for us than the President.

So to come back to Hillary Clinton, I found a very interesting article in the New York Times “THE NEW YORK PRIMARY: THE INCUMBENT; A Renominated Clinton Forgoes the Victory Dance” by Anne Kornblut (September 13, 2006) about the fact that Senator Clinton didn’t celebrated her victory at the primaries of the Democrat Party and instead went back to Washington. Maybe the intention of the journalist was just to criticize Hillary Clinton, but what I want to learn from that article, that if she felt comfortable to not have a party after winning the primaries, it is only because she knows that it wouldn’t be an issue. We are all aware of the fact that politicians depend a lot on their reputation, which bring us again to the question of how much the constituent know about their representatives.

For example, the New-York Sun, for September, published eight articles about Senator Clinton, while at the same time it publishes about four articles a day about the “war on terror”. Of course, one can argue that National Security interest more people, especially after 9/11, but as President Clinton said in his interview on Sunday night, if people want to know something it is because of the media. Media are responsible (partially?) for the level of interest and awareness that people have on some issues. In Newsday, which is a local newspaper, the editor chose to start publishing articles about the elections only a day before the primaries until three days later.

Leighley wrote that most voters won’t go and research about the candidates but will probably wait for the information to come to them. Considering the coverage that media offer to the “off year” elections, we shouldn’t be surprise if we’ll get, again, a low percentage of voters for the upcoming elections.