The American education system has seriously short-changed the general public by not teaching them the tools that media professionals use to do their work.

By the oversight, the public is left vulnerable to misunderstanding and manipulation in its daily encounters with any media product, which is troublesome at any time, but particularly so during events like presidential campaigns, which have a long-term effect on the public’s future.

There are three parties to a presidential campaign: the candidates, the media, and the public. It is a structure that does not favor the public. The candidates are presented and promoted by party organizations that are deep in media professionals. The media is, of course, the profession of media. The public has received very little, if any, education in media, because such courses are not part of the American general education K-12 curriculum. In trying to follow campaign coverage, the public is prone to a) be manipulated by the candidate organizations, and b) to misinterpret media reporting to the extent that trust in the media is eroded.

How much different might it be if the K-12 curriculum included a course in “The Definition of News”? The definition has variations, but a serviceable one, good enough to be taught in most journalism schools, defines news as anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.

Then the public would have a clear view that a plane crash is news because it changes the status quo, or the way things are. A result, a verdict, a decision, a final score, a murder, a 9/11 attack, all are the types of news that change the status quo.

The public would also understand the extreme news power – and value – of that which threatens to change the status quo. The public would know that practically all drama, whether factual (a SWAT standoff) or fictional (“The Silence of the Lambs”), is rooted in that threat. Nothing has changed yet, but it very possibly will, or in fact it very certainly will. Two huge media businesses, with daily allocated space in the newspapers, and their own television channels, are based on no more than this threat to the status quo. Weather and sports.

And to that, add politics. In fact, media professionals in politics have almost the same techniques with threat-based news as the media professionals who run the National Football League. Schedule a primary, line up some pollsters to predict who is going to win, present preliminary debates, and sit back and watch the public blame the media when the pollsters are wrong.

If you have several primaries scheduled for the same day, call it Super Tuesday. Then schedule Super Tuesday two days after the Super Bowl! The political media professionals, who are extremely sophisticated with their skills, know that this is terrible hype, but that’s okay, because they know the public will blame the hype on the media.

But a media-educated public would know that charge isn’t true, because the media is obligated to report the news, a definition of which is, anything that threatens to change the status quo. So the media covers the event, knowing at the same time how smoothly they can get caught in the middle, as they did in the New Hampshire fiasco with polling numbers. The media was stung by that wave of criticism, prompting Chris Matthews to wonder, “What are we supposed to do, stay home?” A public that knows what the media knows would understand his consternation.