Politics & Power Quote by Michael Pollan

Pollan is calling out a structural bias dressed up as professional neutrality: the press is built to metabolize conflict, not consensus. His phrasing makes that indictment feel less like a partisan gripe and more like a law of media physics. “Simply cannot” isn’t a complaint about individual bad reporters; it’s an argument that the incentives of mainstream journalism - deadlines, clicks, the “both sides” frame, and the need for perpetual novelty - make agreement nearly invisible. If politics is narrated as a cage match, then bipartisan alignment becomes a dead zone: no villains, no clear winners, no clean storyline.

The “black hole” metaphor does heavy lifting. A black hole doesn’t just hide things; it bends the space around it. Pollan implies that when both parties quietly converge (on defense budgets, surveillance powers, corporate subsidies, deregulation with different branding), the lack of coverage doesn’t merely omit facts. It distorts public understanding of what power actually prioritizes. Citizens are fed endless coverage of symbolic trench warfare while the shared, consequential bargains happen off-camera.

Context matters: Pollan’s broader work often tracks how institutions normalize harmful outcomes while claiming inevitability. Here he’s applying that lens to political storytelling. The intent isn’t to romanticize bipartisanship; it’s to warn that consensus can be where the most entrenched interests are safest. If journalists can’t narrate agreement, then accountability collapses right where governing becomes most real: in the deals everyone quietly accepts.