Part of the problem, a very big part of the problem, is bad journalism. It is hard for the public to make informed decisions, or even to make informed comments, when the information is not readily available.
A very good friend of mine, sweetest woman in the world, is of the ‘Vote Blue no matter who’ persuasion, which I vehemently disagree with, as anybody who’s read any of my comments over the past year and a bit knows. Anyway, she posted an article about how Democrats won a formerly Republican seat. It was just in the NY state legislature, but that stuff counts, too. I was about to make a snide comment about ‘Is he a Berniecrat or just your run of the mill corporate owned might-as-well-be-a-Republican kind of Democrat,’ but, I decided I should read the article first, which I often don’t do, on the off chance that that information was contained therein. It was not.
That should be an obligatory item in any article about a Democrat winning a seat. It’s important, and lots of people want to know. Lots of people base their vote on that kind of information. It is journalistic malpractice to leave it out. How does a journalist know if the candidate is a Berniecrat or not? The journalist asks.
Except the journalists don’t. And that is a big problem.
