Arkady
President
When a policy is proposed, I want to decide whether or not it's likely to be a good thing for the country. That's the only way to know whether to support it. For example, if the proposal is taxpayer-financed after-school programs for poor kids, or requiring polling places to demand certain types of ID before a person can vote, I'd like to know things such as:
(1) What issue is meant to be addressed, and how significant is that issue, in an historical and international context. For example, do we have a lot of poor kids spending their after-school hours in a bad setting, and do we have a lot of the kind of voter fraud that voter ID requirements would address?
(2) Have similar efforts been tried before, nationally, or at the state or local level, or somewhere abroad, and what were the outcomes?
(3) What are some of the alternatives to address the same issues? What do other leading countries do about the issue? How does the likely effectiveness of those alternatives compare with the proposal?
(4) What will it cost, and how do those costs stack up both with the value of the likely outcome, and with the cost of alternatives?
(5) Is it a tested idea? Is it expanding on a successful program at a lower level, importing a successful program from abroad, reviving a successful program from the past, or further evolving a successful program already being used?
(6) If it's an untested idea, is it something that emerged from an academic setting or a political one? Is it something with lots of research supporting it, or just something that poll-tested well with voters? Those things will give me a feel for whether the claims have strong theoretical backing from ample study and analysis, or if it's just an idea a partisan hack dreamed up because he thought it would sound appealing to his candidate's base.
(7) Where is the monetary and political support for enacting the policy coming from? Is it a grass-roots initiative? Are big donors pushing it? If the latter, do they have a vested interest in it? That will help me understand the context for any claims being made in its favor.
All those things give a person a better ability to discern if the proposed policy is likely to be good for the country or not. Yet, most stories that deal with political news never bother to provide any of that kind of useful material. Instead, this is how a typical story will read:
Paragraph 1: Brief overview of what is being fought about.
Paragraph 2: Quotation of supporting party's spin.
Paragraph 3: Quotation of opposing party's counter-spin.
Paragraph 4: Vegas-style odds on likelihood of proposal being enacted.
Paragraph 5-10: In depth analysis of who the likely "winners" and "losers" will be from this fight, with especially close attention to how it will play for likely candidates in the next presidential election.
If there's any more space after that, it'll then dive into very personal and trivial stuff about who is embarrassed, who has been betrayed, who is getting revenge, which politicians have become strange bedfellows over this, what mean or witty things have been said about it all, etc.
Essentially, most of the column is sports coverage of the "competition," and then there's a tail end of gossip coverage of the celebrities involved. Generally, actual policy analysis is confined to that two-paragraph regurgitation of each side's spin, with the reporter bringing in no additional facts, context, or analysis.
(1) What issue is meant to be addressed, and how significant is that issue, in an historical and international context. For example, do we have a lot of poor kids spending their after-school hours in a bad setting, and do we have a lot of the kind of voter fraud that voter ID requirements would address?
(2) Have similar efforts been tried before, nationally, or at the state or local level, or somewhere abroad, and what were the outcomes?
(3) What are some of the alternatives to address the same issues? What do other leading countries do about the issue? How does the likely effectiveness of those alternatives compare with the proposal?
(4) What will it cost, and how do those costs stack up both with the value of the likely outcome, and with the cost of alternatives?
(5) Is it a tested idea? Is it expanding on a successful program at a lower level, importing a successful program from abroad, reviving a successful program from the past, or further evolving a successful program already being used?
(6) If it's an untested idea, is it something that emerged from an academic setting or a political one? Is it something with lots of research supporting it, or just something that poll-tested well with voters? Those things will give me a feel for whether the claims have strong theoretical backing from ample study and analysis, or if it's just an idea a partisan hack dreamed up because he thought it would sound appealing to his candidate's base.
(7) Where is the monetary and political support for enacting the policy coming from? Is it a grass-roots initiative? Are big donors pushing it? If the latter, do they have a vested interest in it? That will help me understand the context for any claims being made in its favor.
All those things give a person a better ability to discern if the proposed policy is likely to be good for the country or not. Yet, most stories that deal with political news never bother to provide any of that kind of useful material. Instead, this is how a typical story will read:
Paragraph 1: Brief overview of what is being fought about.
Paragraph 2: Quotation of supporting party's spin.
Paragraph 3: Quotation of opposing party's counter-spin.
Paragraph 4: Vegas-style odds on likelihood of proposal being enacted.
Paragraph 5-10: In depth analysis of who the likely "winners" and "losers" will be from this fight, with especially close attention to how it will play for likely candidates in the next presidential election.
If there's any more space after that, it'll then dive into very personal and trivial stuff about who is embarrassed, who has been betrayed, who is getting revenge, which politicians have become strange bedfellows over this, what mean or witty things have been said about it all, etc.
Essentially, most of the column is sports coverage of the "competition," and then there's a tail end of gossip coverage of the celebrities involved. Generally, actual policy analysis is confined to that two-paragraph regurgitation of each side's spin, with the reporter bringing in no additional facts, context, or analysis.
