An eye-opening study of the 2016 election by Tyndall Report, which tracks the content of the three nightly news programs on the broadcast networks, finds that since the beginning of the year, they have devoted a grand total of 32 minutes to comparing the major-party candidates for president on policy grounds. Just eight years ago, the tally was 220 minutes.

No single statistic about this election better explains why Donald Trump has a non-trivial shot at being elected president next week. Internal media pressures and decades of campaign reporting biases converged in 2016 to create a bread-and-circuses election, and it’s only natural that the ultimate bread-and-circuses candidate has reaped the benefits. Even if Hillary Clinton prevails, the means by which we get there—through a media gauntlet that prizes scandal over substance, and gotcha politics over the best tax plan—guarantees a perpetual cycle of distraction.

That’s hardly an original line of criticism, I know. But we often overlook the ultimate consequence: This distortion cycle enables governance that puts the pursuits of special interests over the people. The game is rigged, all right. But it’s rigged against treating politics as something that tangibly matters in people’s lives, rather than as a sideshow.

The game is rigged, all right. But it’s rigged against treating politics as something that tangibly matters in people’s lives.

How did we get to this point? To really understand the decline of substance in campaign journalism, you can’t just blame cable news or the Internet: You have to go back to traditional media’s willful elimination of the public-interest motive in news coverage. Many analysts have recounted, as a prime example, how network television news was originally not expected to turn a profit, and how news divisions merely served the purpose of fulfilling the public-service conditions of FCC charters, freed from the ratings pressures of the entertainment properties.

This was never true. Network news always reeled in plenty of advertising. And while magazine shows like 60 Minutes did prove that news could compete with entertainment for profits, it’s not as though news divisions had suffered in poverty before then. However, we do know that the FCC gradually dismantled its public-interest requirements starting in the 1980s, and thereafter ratings and revenues became paramount. We often hear about the FCC’s old Fairness Doctrine in this context; once upon a time, it forced broadcasters to air both sides of contentious stories and give political candidates equal time. But while the 1987 repeal of the Doctrine was a blow, it was only a part of a continuum: The FCC declined to enforce the public-interest obligation, and broadcast networks declined to adhere to it.