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There’s a report at The Hill exposing the media’s manipulation of events leading up to election day.

The short-attention span generation has birthed the shiny-object election.

The theme of the 2014 midterms — to whatever extent one is discernable — has been an explosion of one crisis after another, each of which demands an enormous amount of media attention before fading for the next one.

From the Secret Service to ISIS, Ebola to immigration, mistreated veterans to Ferguson and race relations, candidates and the president have been forced to react to the controversy du jour.

Strategists and experts say the result has been bad news for Democrats, who have had a tougher time underscoring their preferred campaign messages on their party’s support for women and the middle class.

Instead, each shiny object captivating a media that craves the hottest story has helped Republicans making the elections for the House and Senate all about President Obama.

“Every time there is a major issue — or as were now referring to everything, crisis — it seems to reverberate on Obama,” said Democratic strategist Peter Fenn. “It plays into what was already a sour political mood and compounds it.”

Crisis management has forced the White House to name new czars, fire political appointees and drop bombs, even as Republicans point to missteps as signs of Obama’s weak leadership and the government’s lack of competency.

Vulnerable Democrats are put in the unenviable position of either backing the president or lobbing criticism at their party’s leader.

“It totally threw the Democratic game plan off,” said Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer. “They wanted to focus on the economic recovery, Republican extremism, and it’s hard for candidates to speak about that with these issues coming up.” …TheHill

Uh… wait a minute. Who owns and polishes the shiny objects? Not me. Not you. The media take immediate possession of them, minute by minute. That means if there’s any single cause of our decline into angry quarreling the media are to blame.

But aren’t we at fault for letting ’em get away with it? Sure we are. We’re their paying customers. We comb the media for shiny objects. We seize on each one as it’s shown to us, hoping maybe it’s the key to a win for our side.

That’s what makes it so hard to tell who is the greater threat to America: you and me? the consumers? Or the media?

Hold on! How about the shareholders of media/industrial empires? Well, they turn out to be you and me, whether we have nice stock portfolios or a piece of the action through our pension plans or interest-bearing bank account…

Well, I suppose we could run for Congress ourselves. Or run for the presidency? No, not that job. The White House usually winds up in the worst position. Check out reality, as stated by a (probably exhausted) White House press secretary:

“The president and his administration at the direction of the president comes in and, through a lot of hard work, puts in place a solution. But by the time that solution is put in place, everybody has sort of moved on to something else.” ...The Hill

Cross-posted from Prairie Weather

graphic via shutterstock.com