Political coverage is more noise than news

[Commentary] After months spent consuming endless cable TV news coverage of this endless presidential campaign, I've got a theory: The more attention they pay to a subject, the less viewers actually learn. Trying to capitalize on the contentious, percolating viewer magnet that the campaign has become, each big cable news channel has its own evening show focused on the election: Fox's America's Election HQ, MSNBC's Race to the White House and CNN's Election Center. I recorded each show on April 9 and watched closely, eager to test my hypothesis. The timing was good: Deep into the six-week break between primary elections, these shows offered a look at what cable might cover when actual news is in short supply. Unfortunately, I found news programs chewing over morsels of information like grazing cows, taking a sliver of reported fact and massaging it with analysis and supposition until viewers had a tough time separating fact from assumption and opinion. It's the high "signal-to-noise ratio" of cable news, the way punditry and strategy often overwhelm the meat of reportage. Not surprisingly, the show with the highest ratio this day was on Fox News.
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