Haircuts and Gossip -- Pageantlike Presidential Election Coverage; Where's the Real News?

There's a semantic problem with the word "politics." It has two major meanings, which are connected but distinct. Politics is the art of governing nations, but it can also mean the tactics employed to attain or retain governmental control. This creates an obstacle for the person who reads the "politics" section of his favorite newspaper or website, or who watches shows that purport to cover politics, with the intent of learning about what his government is doing. Often, there's really nothing at all about running the government; it's all about running for government. Check out the last four stories that plopped out of the Associated Press' "Politics" feed:

• Sharpton denies disputing Romney's faith
• Obama overstates Kansas tornado deaths
• Edwards discusses time at hedge fund
• Spitzer, O'Malley to endorse Clinton

There's nothing there about what's happening in the outside world, nor any coverage of actual governmental activities. It's just gossip about celebrities. The fact that those celebrities happen to be members of our government is incidental. These stories aren't about policy, or politics, really. They're about the candidates' chances to be the last one standing.

This is not a new phenomenon, of course, but it does seem to get a worse every time, and in vast increments. Election coverage is not only deplorably shallow; its nonstop, news-cycle-dominating prominence is obscuring larger reality. It's stealth entertainment news, wearing the guise of legitimate national affairs journalism. There's nothing significantly different in the tone of coverage of the Obama-Clinton rivalry from that of Paris and Nicole. Romney's Mormonism is handled no differently than Tom Cruise's Scientology.

That would be bad enough in itself, but the worse problem is, while we're torturing ourselves with a harrowing, incessant, two-year pageant of inauthenticity, real shit is still happening all over the world. And we're hearing even less than usual about it, because it's just so much easier for commentators to talk about what has essentially become the Olympics of fund-raising than to address the actual government or what it actually does. By comparing stats and rumors about presidential hopefuls, columnists and talking heads are able to give the impression of covering the government without actually doing anything of the sort. Watch Joe Scarborough segue easily from a segment about the latest presidential gaffe to a schadenfreude session over Paris Hilton's jail sentence, and you'll see. He doesn't even have to switch gears; it's the same damn thing. This type of presidential infotainment is not even taking up half of the space allotted for political coverage; it's taking up nearly all of it, the remainder of which is mainly filled by "White House says this, critics say that." And we're a year and a half from what will surely be too brief a reprieve. For all this time, the presidential one-note symphony will drown out what little serious news our already atrophic press might otherwise present.

Let's take a serious, and seriously neglected, news item for example: The Iraqi Hydrocarbon Law.

The Hydrocarbon Law is universally detested by Iraqis and hasn't passed yet, but "tremendous" pressure is being exerted on the parliament by the United States and the International Monetary Fund, the mother of all loan sharks. The IMF has a habit of lending huge amounts of money to struggling nations and making the privatization of their natural resources a condition of said loans. The same has been done doubly in Iraq. The administration and the IMF describe the law as a benevolent revenue-sharing program that gives oil money to the Iraqis, but the law makes 81 percent of Iraq's known oil deposits available to multinational firms -- Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron and the like. While the proposed law has met ironically unified resistance in Iraq and may not pass even in a compromised form, its initial draft -- reviewed by nine oil companies and the U.S. and U.K. governments long before Iraqi MPs ever got a peek--should have been a major story itself, because it was the other shoe, the inevitable punch line to the WMD joke. What the Hydrocarbon Law in its pure form said was yes, after all, this thing was always about the oil.