The Issues Americans Care About

[Kevin D. Williamson], National Review Online

There's been a chorus of post-debate hee-hawing about how the ABC moderators ignored "the issues." Every election, we're treated to pious lectures about how Americans really want to hear about "the issues" and don't care about personality politics and other trivia.

Is there any persuasive evidence for this belief?

In the media world, there's lots of evidence to the contrary:

Circulation of Foreign Affairs: about 160,000

Circulation of The National Enquirer: more than 1 million.

Foreign Affairs, to its credit, published lengthy essays from the major presidential primary candidates on their foreign-policy thoughts. The essays were not, for the most part, very good. But if one wants to learn in some detail about Barack Obama slightly fuzzy foreign-policy ideas, his essay in Foreign Affairs would be a reasonable place to start. So how many people read that essay? Less than the population of Springfield, Missouri, or Greensboro, North Carolina. By way of comparison, that J-Lo baby scoop in People magazine will be read by more people than live in Los Angeles, Chicago, or Houston, two or three times as many people as live in Philadelphia or Phoenix, about three times the population of Dallas. The combined readership of People and TV Guide is larger than the population of Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Greece, or Israel—and about twice the population of Hong Kong—while the paid readership of the Middle East Journal could be comfortably seated in the Cleveland Music Hall.

This isn't to say that small journals don't do important work—of course they do—but it's also true that they serve a relatively small readership because magazine readerships are self-selecting, and readers' preferences suggest that they care more about celebrity gossip than they care about reading about terrorism, trade, or the economy at any length.