Noting the short attention spans of both the news media and the American people is not exactly a startling revelation. We’ve always been distracted, and today there are so many more ways for us to be distracted. The difference now is that nothing ever seems to get done about the issues that momentarily grasp our attention. We just wait for the news cycle to pass.
The Ebola scare is a classic example. A handful of cases sparked a wave of national hysteria about the potential for a health epidemic. Within days of the first case being reported in Texas, politicians were calling for a travel ban from affected African countries, and the president was being pilloried for his weak response to what was at best a minor health crisis. But the bigger national challenges raised by the Ebola scare were largely ignored — the importance of vaccines for much more pervasive illnesses like the flu, the lack of public funds for prevention and public health, and the impact of budget austerity on federal, state, and local health departments and agencies.
In an ideal world the Ebola crisis would have been an opportunity to address these issues.
Instead, America got a new czar.
None of this should seem unusual. Consider the various crises of the past several years. Two years ago, 26 people, including 20 children, were killed in a mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. A majority of Americans clamored for new gun control measures. Legislation was introduced in Congress to expand background checks. It was blocked by Republicans and a smattering of Democrats — and, just like that, guns were off the national agenda. It’s barely been an issue in the midterm elections. And even though 90 percent of Americans support background checks, there is no indication it will be going anywhere in Congress next year.
Before that there was income inequality and the Occupy movement. More recently, there was ISIS, Ukraine, and the NSA scandal. There’s immigration, and of course there’s the country’s continued sluggish economic growth and stubborn unemployment. There’s Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, Mo., and the specter of police killings of young black men. There’s Hurricane Sandy and the constant drumbeat of doom and gloom stories over climate change.
All these stories have grabbed the nation’s attention and had thousands of words written about them. They’ve been the overbearing focus of media stories — from local news to the cable networks.
Yet, over the past four years, national politicians have not addressed any of these issues in any substantive way. The issues remain festering wounds, unaddressed and subsumed by the next crisis du jour — and all that is unlikely to change no matter what the result on Election Day.
On one level, that’s not altogether bad — sometimes rash reactions are the wrong ones. But what’s happening now feels different. There is no serious response. Issues that take up so much media oxygen quickly get turned into political footballs, in which liberals and conservatives adopt a singular narrative that runs completely counter to the one being drafted on the other side — making it politically impossible to do anything about them. There are exceptions, of course. Terrorism — and the out-size fears around it — seems to be the one issue that can still unite Americans and get Congress to do something. But here at home, not so much.
It is the unholy spawn of short attention spans, the constant distractions of our daily lives, America’s growing political polarization and deeply dysfunctional political institutions.
Michael A. Cohen is a fellow at the Century Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.