Peter Wilby is pretty close to the mark in his commentary on US election coverage in Monday’s Media Guardian:

Interest in the game eclipses the message

I don’t want to spoil the fun, but I wonder if British columnists are getting a little too excited about the US elections. In the Guardian, for example, Timothy Garton Ash, writing after Super Tuesday, saw it as a triumph for the “soft power of democracy”. He reckoned you could “strike up a conversation with a complete stranger in any bar in any city on any continent” and ask whether he or she was backing Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But the more pertinent question would be whether, even in America, the stranger had the first idea as to what either candidate would do in office.

The Pew research centre in Washington estimated, even before the voting started, that two-thirds of media coverage was dedicated to “the game” rather than to the political content of the candidates’ campaigns. American political writers, like our own dear Westminster hacks, find it hard to wrestle with policies and ideologies, and largely duck out of their responsibility to make such things accessible and interesting. The result is that US presidential candidates, when they take office, are hardly at all constrained by electoral commitments, except to corporations and pressure groups who provided the campaign funds. And this is the electoral system commentators hold up for our admiration.

Garton Ash compared the Clinton-Obama contest to “an exciting horse race or a well-made soap opera”. Precisely.

If anything, alas, he was understating his case. The management of this election by the media seems to be serving to actively undermine American democracy.

Take the issue of climate change. The League of Conservation Voters have been continuing their count of the number of times the top Sunday hosts of the major TV networks in the US have so far mentioned global warming in their questions to candidates in the presidential race. At present, they’ve reached a grand total of six – out of 3,061. That’s just under 0.2% of the total. Two-and-a-half times that number of questions were specifically about one Mr Bill Clinton. Nine times that number were about religion and faith; around thirteen times that number about abortion.

But let’s look on the bright side. Fox News are no longer in the lead in terms of questions asked, as they were a month ago; they’re now level pegging with NBC and CNN, each of them mentioning global warming a grand total of twice each. And climate change is at least still beating the issue of UFOs, which come in at a poor three questions (0.1% of the total).

Before we start despairing about the ignorance and apathy of Americans towards the rest of the world, however, it’s worth having a look at how significant US citizens themselves – as opposed to their national television media – consider the issue to be. Fortunately there’s no lack of polling data on this, and the picture it reveals is quite striking.

Environmental Research Web, for instance, reported on the results of one major poll of US opinion in October 2007 (emphases mine):

According to a recent survey of public opinion in the US, 68% of respondents were in favour of a new international treaty requiring the US to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 90% by the year 2050. The poll, conducted by Yale University, Gallup and the ClearVision Institute, also found that 40% of those questioned said that a presidential candidate’s position on global warming will be either extremely or very important when they vote.

“One of the most surprising findings was the growing sense of urgency,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. “Nearly half of all Americans now believe that global warming is either already having dangerous impacts on people around the world, or will in the next 10 years – a 20% point increase since 2004. These results indicate a sea change in public opinion.”

In addition to the reported results, a further 35% of respondents say that a candidate’s position on climate change will be “somewhat important” when they vote (bringing the total of those who see climate change as at least a “somewhat important” election issue to 75%). 30% of respondents said climate change is having “dangerous impacts now”. 62% agreed with the statement “Life on earth will continue without major disruptions only if we take immediate and drastic action to reduce global warming”. (33% “strongly”; 29% “somewhat”). 50% “personally worry about global warming” (15% a great deal; 35% a fair amount).

In addition (all data cited below is available via these two pages):

• A March 2007 poll by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org found that 43% of Americans consider climate change “a serious and pressing problem”; 46% view it as a “critical threat”; a further 39% consider it “an important but not critical threat”. 93% of Americans consider improving the global environment at least an “important goal” (including some 54% who consider it “very important”).

• An April 2007 ABC News/Washington Post/Stanford University Poll of Americans found 82% of respondents saying global warming was at least “somewhat important” to them personally; including 52% said it was either “very important” (34%) or “extremely important” (18%).

• A June 2007 poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 47% of Americans view climate change as a “very serious” problem, while another 28% say it is somewhat serious.

• In an August 2007 Newsweek Poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, 63% responded that climate change would be at least “one of several important issues” on which they would base their vote for members of the U.S. Congress (4% said the single most important). A plurality of 46% saw global warming, “[l]ooking ahead 50 years from today” to be “a major threat to human life on earth”.

• A September 2007 BBC World Service/GlobeScan/Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) poll found that 59% of Americans thought it necessary to take “major steps” on climate change “very soon” (another 33% thought it necessary to take “modest steps in coming years”).

• In a September 2007 Associated Press-Stanford University poll by Ipsos Public Affairs, 59% of respondents agreed that “[i]f nothing is done to reduce global warming in the future”, it will be a “very serious problem for the world” (23% “somewhat serious”).

• In an October 2007 Harris poll, fully 81% of respondents agreed that, “[a]s the world’s leading industrial country, the United States needs to set the lead when it comes to controlling greenhouse gases and pollution.”

Whoever they may be representing when US media election coverage marginalises climate change, then, it certainly isn’t that country’s population. There are various reasons why this may be, but the most significant are without doubt economic. As the authors of one study put it,

“Television’s tendency to present a one-sided view is compounded by the economic imperatives of a system funded by advertising. The upbeat tone of the coverage [is] seen as necessary to retain advertisers, since nobody wants their product surrounded by images of death, pain and destruction.”

Media decisions (or simply the prevailing journalistic culture) are constrained and influenced by

“the need to deliver to advertisers audiences in the “proper mindset” to be conducive to commercial messages. Thus, rather than as a result of any explicit “conspiracy,” the media [need] to minimize any potentially controversial messages which might unsettle the audience.”

As Peter Wilby (who has in the past edited the New Statesman and Independent on Sunday) put it in an earlier column (emphasis mine),

“whatever readers want, newspapers face relentless pressure for more good news from one particular source. Most advertisers do not like to be associated with bad news. If readers feel worried and insecure, advertisers believe, they are less likely to go out and spend. Guilt-inducing copy about poverty, disease, starvation and climate change is worst of all.”

According to some fascinating information gleaned by the US organisation Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting from AdAge.com, the oil giant BP have:

“issued directives demanding that their ads be pulled from any edition of a publication that included potentially “objectionable” content. BP went so far as to demand advance notice of any stories that mention the company, a competitor of the company or the oil and energy industry in general”.

And they’re not alone. According to one “anonymous editor”, speaking to Advertising Age, there’s “a fairly lengthy list of companies that have instructions like this”; as one magazine executive – also speaking anonymously – adds, “magazines are not in the financial position today to buck rules from advertisers.”

Here’s another interesting example, from the Los Angeles Business Journal:

“KNBC-TV (Channel 4) President and (General Manager Paula Madison said she has instructed her sales department to forward any advertiser concerns to management. “We can work that out. We can structure content so that your ads are not placed against disturbing pictures,” Madison said. …

“Madison acknowledged that advertiser skittishness hits television worse than other forms of media.”

While advertisers are powerfully influential then, there are some other avenues of pressure – a good reason to tell the Sunday news hosts to start troubling to ask about the most significant crisis the world faces in their questions to presidential candidates. So: why not help do your bit for American democracy – along with the future of human beings in general – by signing the League of Conservation Voters’ petition?