How To Pick A Candidate

Here is just something typical I ran up against on the w.e.b. (wonderful entertaining bottomlessness.)

Katrina Trinko reports on Bachmann's Iowa operation and finds it to be a lot less exciting to be around since its heyday -- which pretty much lasted a few hours on the day of the Iowa Straw Poll. Now Iowa is buzzing about Rick Perry and Herman Cain. But while "the frontrunner trappings are gone," Bachmann remains confident:
-via Huff Post

This is an example of the way the media covers elections today. When people talk this way they are not talking about the candidates or their capabilities to govern well, but rather about the media coverage of that --- indirectly covering the candidates. I am sorry I do not totally understand this.
     But I guess it must make some kind of sense. Or, it is just the best we can do.
     So, if I want to pick a candidate I need to go through what Neal Stephenson calls a "mediated experience." ........[see his book: In The Beginning Was The Command Line, described on Wikipedia: an essay on operating systems including the histories of and relationships between DOS, Windows, Linux, and BeOS from both cultural and technical viewpoints and focusing especially on the development of the Graphical User Interface, was published in book form in 2000][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson]........
      I am required as a citizen to view or listen to advertisements for the candidates? And that is the only information I am able to get? Since the media coverage is just the same kind of thing.  I can't get real information about the candidates I am to vote on unless I go back to the direct sources in defiance of Huff Post? What would be a direct source of information on Cain or other candidates? How many persons would make the effort to obtain it? Is there some alternative to doing that? Do advertisements and media style accounts of elections make it easier to chose a candidate? If they do not, aren't media businesses actually our enemies? And what is the distinction between advertising and information?
     Whose responsibility is it to see to it that the public gets actual information? A few librarians? No matter what I do our system of selecting candidates and voting on them just does not make sense to me. What does it mean that the voting process, supposedly a component of democratic process if not the heart of it, is dominated by advertising? What?
     I'm still confused. Help!, I yelp!