Becoming a Well-Informed Voter

Arthur Solomon

So, you didn’t pay much attention to what the candidates said during the primary season. Understandable. Who could listen to months of nearly 20 candidates continually saying bad things about each other?

You also didn’t take seriously what the candidates said after the primary season concluded. Again, also understandable. You were tired of political rhetoric day after day, and anyway, who wants to listen to candidates tell you how great they are during the lazy, hazy days of summer?

But now Labor Day is history, the debates will soon be over and Election Day is not too far away. It’s time to start paying attention to the candidates: not just the Presidential candidates but their surrogates, your Congresspersons and Senators. It’s also time to do your own homework and dismiss most of the loop-recording-like coverage provided by cable TV political reporters.

Here’s how to do just that and become a well-informed voter.

Tune out the daily cable news political shows. Reporting daily what candidates say while providing minimal insight is a waste of your time. After a few news cycles you’re already familiar with candidate’s declarations. Political shows’ go-to formula is to have Democratic and Republican spokespeople comment on the campaign. What do you expect them to say? Duh!

Don’t waste your time watching the Sunday morning political shows. With the exception of Chris Wallace’s show, where hardballs are tossed equally at Republicans and Democrats, softball questions are the norm for guests. The Sunday morning shows rely on Democratic and Republican politicians/spokespersons. Again, what do you expect them to say?

Don’t take pundits’ opinions seriously. Many are former campaign directors of failed campaigns. And journalist’s pundits’ predictions aren’t any better than race track touts. (Believe me. In addition to working on political campaigns, I supervised the PR effort of a thoroughbred racing TV show for eight years.) A late addition to the pundit’s line-up was Trumps former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski by CNN. This is tantamount to a bank hiring Willie Sutton as a guard, considering CNN said that Lewandowski may be legally unable to say anything negative about Trump because of a nondisclosure agreement.

What you should do to become a better informed voter is to read a major daily newspaper’s political reporting. If there’s not a major paper in your community, subscribe to one online.

Don’t take attack ads seriously. Most are completely devoid of the truth, or at best misleading, unless they use candidate’s exact words, as the Clinton campaign has done. Don’t take seriously comments from talk radio or talk TV political show hosts. They are certainly not objective.

Don’t listen to supposedly impartial spokespeople from think tanks. Think tanks have agendas. Impartiality is rare, if ever.

Don’t be swayed by editorial writers or columnists of newspapers. As their electronic colleagues, they’re only expressing personal opinions. Base your opinion from what you read in the news sections of respected papers.

Don’t believe opinions written for social network sites. Anyone can write anything, with little or no accuracy checks.

Don’t take the ubiquitous political polls too seriously. A 2015 New York Times story about polling reported that in 2014, only eight percent of people called responded to polls because of the increased use of answering machines and cell phones (and perhaps maybe because people like me are tired of being interrupted by robot calls).

And especially don’t be swayed by the comments of politicians after rulings with which they disagree. Before clearing Clinton of criminal charges, FBI director James Comey was hailed by Republican politicians as the greatest person since Moses came down with the Ten Commandments. Immediately after his decision, these same Republicans denounced Comey as if he was Attila the Hun, Hitler and Pontius Pilate incarnate.

A major reason I fault cable TV political reporting is because when reporters’ information can be historically incomplete when they try to offer insight on political decisions. This is particularly true of the candidates’ beat reporters, whose reports are largely echoes of what candidates have just said without adding any significant new insight.

An oft repeated reason for Donald Trump’s popularity, according to beat reporters, is that, “he’s a businessman, not a career politician,” as if he’s the first to do that. Better knowledge of political history would let these reporters know that Presidents with business experience are not that unusual. (Neither are Presidents without either political or business experience unusual). If political reporters did their homework before developing a story line, they’d discover that Mitt Romney, the Bushes, Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson were businessmen before they became Presidents too. They could look it up. So can you.

I understand why beat reporters might dismiss most of the above list, considering those Presidents weren’t major corporate executives. But certainly Romney was. And how can any beat reporter sprouting the business background as a major part of Trump’s success not mention Ross Perot, who ran unsuccessfully for President in 1992 and 1996?

One of the less insightful reporting examples of the year, to date, occurred on June 22, when a CNN reporter announced that Marco Rubio had decided to run for reelection as a Senator and added that if Rubio lost that would be the end of his political career. People knowledgeable about political history might remember that the same was said about Richard Nixon when he lost the California governorship election in 1962.

I blame the cable networks for the dumbing down of politics. Their coverage could be titled “Politics for Dummies” because of their ubiquitous use of political spokespeople of both parties, along with apparently anyone else who’s available, such as “Bikers for Trump,” who were seen July 16 on MSNBC.

On a personal note, my first PR job was with a political PR firm, working on local, statewide and Presidential campaigns. Each election was “the most important election in our lifetime,” but as the old campaign hands told me when things didn’t work out as we wished: “don’t worry. In two years you’ll get another opportunity to save the world in the next most important election of our lifetime.”

So here we are, facing yet again the most important election in our lifetime.

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Arthur Solomon was a senior VP at Burson-Marsteller. He now is a contributor to public relations and sports business publications, consults on PR projects and is on the Seoul Peace Prize nominating committee. He can be reached at [email protected].