Presidential Candidates Appear on Professional Wrestling Program

It’s basically theatre disguised as a contest. It highlights confrontation and image at the expense of competition and substance.

Flashy graphics and longwinded speeches are prevalent. Spontaneity is scripted and authenticity is packaged. Nothing is quite what it appears to be.

Few take it seriously, but most follow it to one degree or another. Many get hurt, and a few get rich.

That’s right—it’s presidential politics.

Tonight, all three presidential candidates will appear on the World Wrestling Entertainment’s Raw program beginning at 8pm EST. Watch previews of their taped segments here, and watch an animated Hillary and Barack get ready to rumble here.

Newsprism’s question: is professional wrestling demeaning to the presidential campaign, or vice-versa

Update: All three candidates looked completely out of their element on Raw tonight, competing to see how many lame wrestling puns and catch phrases they could fit into their minute-long segments. It was transparent, condescending, and canned pandering to an audience they don’t understand or respect. Newsprism wonders if any of the three knows that Abraham Lincoln was a professional wrestler and a genuine man of the people, or that they were the butts of the joke tonight?

Newsprism

 

Contestants in Cable News Race Run in Opposite Directions, Voters Lose

As three major cable news networks—CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews—compete for shares of the cable news audience, the result may be further polarization of the American voter. So says a new study by University of Georgia Professor Barry Hollander.

Hollander studied the news consumption of self-identified Democrats and Republicans using data from the non-partisan Pew Research Center. His findings: people gravitate towards news sources that reinforce their existing beliefs—liberals to CNN and MSNBC, and conservatives to FoxNews.

While this result is no surprise, combined with other trends in voting and media consumption it may portend further polarization among a less informed electorate.

For example, the more voters are exposed exclusively to opinions they already agree with, the more extreme their views are likely to become. In addition, the less news people watch, the less likely they are to vote. Voters who don’t identify strongly with either party are increasingly less likely to consume news, and therefore, to vote.

The trend is towards polarization and extremism in both red and blue states, while moderates give up on the political process and vote in fewer and fewer numbers.

Our democracy risks significant erosion of participation in, and faith in, the electoral process among voters in the center as two polarized, vacuous ideological camps face off over an ever-widening and increasingly empty ideological schism.

Like Nature, politics abhors a vacuum. What will fill the vacuum resulting from these trends is anybody’s guess.

Newsprism