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]]>That they do, in a sense, allowing for some degree of time-lag, in either direction: political decisions lag behind popular opinion in cases like federal marijuana policy (although there are surely more interesting ones that could be found by someone writing something less inherently uninteresting than a blog comment!), and anticipate public opinion quite a bit in cases like desegregation.
But even ignoring that, the problem persists. Whence the median voter's preferences? Is the media completely irrelevant to the formation of a voter's political opinions? What about formal education? What degree of consensus is there among people who work in the media and formal education? Do they trend in a certain direction relative to the median voter? The answers to those questions are: the Cathedral, of course not, of course not, a lot, and leftward.
The Cathedral is another bit of Moldbuggery. I've had bad experiences with spam filters before so I won't link to the exact post of his that this is from, but this bit is pretty self-contained:
The great power center of 2008 is the Cathedral. The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It's as simple as a punch in the mouth.
The Cathedral operates as the brain of a broader power structure, the Polygon or Apparat - the permanent civil service. The Apparat is the civil service proper (all nonmilitary officials whose positions are immune to partisan politics, also known as "democracy"), plus all those formally outside government whose goal is to influence or implement public policy - ie, NGOs. (There's a reason NGOs have to remind themselves that they're "non-governmental.")
(If we did not have an existing category for the press and universities, we could easily think of them as NGOs - in particular, the system wherein journalists are nominally supervised by for-profit media corporations is purely historical. If the Times and its pseudo-competitors ever fail, as they may well, the responsibility of funding and organizing journalism will fall to the great foundations, who will certainly be happy to pick up the relatively small expense.)
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