Why do most newspapers and channels do so much coverage on politicians' affairs and pregnancies? Isn't that the crap that tabloids are built upon?
by 
Anti-Semantic - Quaerens Intellectum
ANSWERS: 1
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I think it basically comes down to this: we have idealized concepts about who our leaders should be -- perfect little angels, dynamic and independent, full of solutions and goodwill. The people we want to lead us are cardboard cut-outs, they don't exist. But those ideal images are the standard against which each candidate is measured (and found wanting, of course). Then we blame the candidates for being sub-par, because we've set the par so high nobody could ever hit it. Naturally, laying out the gameboard this way virtually guarantees that the candidates will be constantly trying to manipulate our perceptions of them so that they'll come as close as possible to the ideal. When they're caught, the "trust" is broken -- of course, the trust was an illusion in the first place. Real trust would be based on a real relationship between real people and real elected officials: people with flaws, who have chosen to step up and try to tackle the tougher jobs, but aren't pretending to be someone they're not. In other words, the electorate is always to blame in a democracy.
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