Self-Absorbed Media Missing the Biggest Story of Our Time

[Commentary] In these past 18 months, we've heard endless punditry on politicians' personalities from people who seem to be even more divorced from the voting public than the politicians they cover. The marketing of the candidates, which used to be the domain of Advertising Age and company, has sometimes threatened to become the whole story. One badly made ad with no media budget is now talked up and analyzed as if it's headline news. Not once have I picked up a newspaper or turned on a broadcast to find a lengthy discussion of how America is going to educate and retrain its citizens to make them competitive in a digitized, globalized economy. Not once have I seen a thorough analysis of what exactly is going to replace the country's rapidly disappearing manufacturing sector. No one outside a handful of people in the business media had -- until last Monday -- given serious time to how we should handle the dissolution of the investment banks, one of the nation's leading wealth-creating institutions. Seems like important stuff, but it's been upstaged by a futile discussion of who said what about lipstick.