If there’s one thing no one in our generation ever hears the end of, it’s that we’re not involved enough in the world around us. The media often decries our low voter turnout rate and insists that, despite the fact that we always have our phones glued to our faces, many of us are tragically politically uninformed.
If they’re so concerned about our lack of involvement, though, why did CNBC refuse to livestream the third Republican debate last Wednesday?
Like many Americans, I’ve been carefully following the circus that is this year’s run up to the major party nominations. I consider casting an informed vote to be my civic duty. So imagine my surprise when I tried to tune into the Republican debate on Oct. 28, only to find out that CNBC had limited its livestream to cable customers.
The fact is that TV viewership is on the decline across America — not that people are actually watching less TV, but they’re not watching it on cable, especially in younger age brackets. Overwhelmingly, millennials do not even have cable subscriptions. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the time to watch TV on someone else’s schedule.
That means that the majority of the people affected by CNBC’s decision not to provide the debate for free online were the very people whose ignorance they cannot stop complaining about.
CNN has livestreamed both of the debates that it has hosted so far, lowering its site’s paywall temporarily both times to allow people access regardless of whether or not they were paying for a subscription to their network. Fox, like CNBC, didn’t. But to be fair, the average age of a Fox viewer is almost 69 years old, so the station is probably not used to considering consumers whose morning routines don't include putting in dentures.
Debates are an important part of a presidential election cycle — they're where we get to audition candidates’ ideas at the same time we’re getting as personal a feel of their characters as we’re allowed to in a political race. As of today, 50 percent of the primary debates this election cycle have been unavailable to large percentages of the population that are eligible to vote.
If the media really wanted us, the demographic with the lowest voter turnout, to get out there and make informed choices about the people running our country and constructing our future, you would think they’d make even the slightest effort to provide us that information.
We shouldn’t have to get political news from Twitter and fractured clips that come out days after the event itself. We shouldn’t have to rely on news stories to reliably cover candidates’ views and performances; we should be able to view the source material in its entirety and make our own judgments. It should not be an uphill battle to know where our future president, whoever that is, stands on the issues that matter to us.
Continuing to bash us for not knowing information that is being withheld from us is hypocritical, self-righteous and completely infuriating.