Furthermore, the incentives set up by the media will make the situation worse. Despite job creation and the economy dominating voter priorities, the actual coverage contained little on any policy, even in these areas. Instead, media outlets delivered the red meat to which their consumers responded – “the horserace, the candidates’ strategies and tactics, the hot-button issues, the heated exchanges.”

That fed into a pattern of coverage that Patterson also criticized for its dumbed-down, media-generated “metanarratives.” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel criticized this trend after the 2000 primaries, and Patterson repeats their warning. “Once a metanarrative is in place, it’s hard for journalists to argue to the contrary and equally hard for them not to play up trivial developments that align with the stereotype.”

In other words, once Sanders becomes the sincere David to Clinton’s calculating Goliath, the media reinforces that metanarrative in all of the coverage that follows. The same holds for Trump’s position as the man with his finger on the pulse of working-class America, a rather ironic position for a billionaire real-estate mogul who has contributed vast amounts of money to both parties. Patterson doesn’t mention the metanarrative about Hillary Clinton and glass ceilings, but it’s also been a constant metanarrative in this cycle. In a sound-bite coverage environment, the incentives line up towards playing up the metanarratives rather than explore ways in which they may not apply.