SANTARELLI: Don’t read this column

The traditional media is dead. My harsh tone for the printed word and yakking head have been triggered by the recent barrage of political endorsements newspapers and other outlets have been making over the past few weeks. Does a local newspaper really influence you enough to make such an important decision? I hope you don’t even take my words to heart that much. People tell you what to do your entire life: parents, teachers, friends, government and books. Do you ever stop to realize everything you have ever read has had a theme or central idea trying to be forced upon you? You are subconsciously or literally ordered to do enough in your life. Something as important as whom you chose, if anyone, to vote for should be a decision made on your own. It should not be a decision based off media opinion.

A lot of things have changed since the creation of the Internet. The traditional forms of news media, papers and TV news, have perhaps changed for the worse. With thousands of different websites with all different uncensored views streaming 24/7 available to read or watch at your convenience, television and print media have taken a big hit. To compete with what the Internet news has to offer, newspapers and TV news have sunk to new lows and advertising absurdities want you to buy that monthly subscription or turn your dial to their station by 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time. These media sources doing anything they can to draw your attention are the same people making endorsements.

While it is the columnists and political commentators’ job to report on politics, I do not find these pundits to be true experts of the field. For the most part, I do not truthfully respect their opinion on politics. Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann books and essays don’t make their way into many political science curriculums for a reason.

Political commentators are just that: commentators. They have made their careers and are successful not because of their knowledge of politics, but because they offer entertaining comments.

Papers, commentators and columnists giving political endorsements are absurd and should not be taken seriously for they don’t come from the true experts in the field; elected officials and political scientists. The outcome of this election will not be in anyway the result of these pundits’ influence, which is all the more reason to disregard it.

The fact is that people want change. Not necessarily the change that has been the driving point in the Obama campaign, but just change itself. Political endorsements on opinion pages this election particularly infuriates me, because they are more meaningless now then ever. I don’t want to discount the fantastic campaign run by Obama or the equally pathetic one run by McCain. I am not overlooking Bush’s unpopularity, the state of the economy, or the war on terror’s effect on the election, but this was just inevitable.

The same party has won three consecutive presidential elections only four times in the last century, and only once since the two-term limit was put into place. It would have required many mistakes made by Democrats and near-perfection from the GOP to avoid seeing executive turnover this year, events which did not happen.

Nothing has been more reliable in predicting presidential elections than the fact that the grass is always greener on the other side. After eight years, people naturally want to try something new. I’m not implying your vote is pointless, but it should not be based off the opinion of newspaper columnists and network personalities who are not the experts to refer to, desperate for attention, and whose opinion will be ultimately trivial to who will become the newest residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The candidates have done a lot of work this campaign, personally investigating the facts before you vote is the least you could do before casting your ballot.

Christopher Santarelli, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at chris5@bu.edu.