DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

John Edwards wasn't really running in the Nevada caucuses - South Carolina was a higher priority - but he put in a few Nevada appearances anyway.

At one of them, in advance of Edwards' entrance, music was played - the "Theme from Peter Gunn," of all things. And a young University of Nevada student, Rachel Miller, introduced him. She had been sent out to talk about the candidate and why she supported him and then, on cue, introduce him. She gave her entire spiel, then looked for the cue which failed to appear. She kept having to come up with things to say and, with aplomb, shared her dilemma with the audience, which laughed along with her. Finally the candidate arrived.

Edwards, like the other candidates, has a set speech he gives at most appearances, though it varies depending on the nature of his audience, the locale, and so on.

During his speech, Edwards kept talking about things that the press seldom covers. Members of the audience asked him about things members of the press seldom ask about. One of the members of the audience, for instance, asked about federal anti-trust law. After doing a little online research I was unable to find a single story by any member of the campaign press corps that dealt with anti-trust law.

At one point Edwards talked about a college plan he has - students who succeed in graduating from high school and getting into college and work ten hours a week would get their tuition and books paid for by a federal program. A friend of mine commented on it and I noticed people around me, through their body language or their words, expressing approval.

It made me wonder why in all the campaign coverage I had never heard of this proposal. Later I ran a search and was able to find only handful of news reports on it - one in the Concord Monitor (in the first primary state of New Hampshire), another in the Des Moines Register (in the first caucus state of Iowa), a third in the Michigan Daily (a college newspaper) plus a couple of passing references in the Los Angeles Times and Christian Science Monitor.

On the other hand, I was able to find hundreds of stories on that expensive haircut Edwards was alleged to have gotten, and several hundred more on the now-discredited story about his selling his home to a couple under federal investigation.

Before I left the Edwards rally, I picked up a booklet containing his platform for the campaign. It's 77 pages long and deals with everything from removing educational barriers for disabled children to net neutrality.

Every candidate faces this problem. How many stories have we seen about Mitt Romney's religion or Hillary Clinton's warmth or lack of it? There's John McCain's temper and Barack Obama's endorsement from Oprah Winfrey. Highlights of previous campaigns included stories about Gary Hart's signature or Bernard Goldberg reporting on the height of the candidates (I'm not making these up). Then there are the minor disputes between candidates and the endless, mind numbing, useless stories about who's ahead - the "horse race" stories.

The same thing happens at the local level. How many media entities in Nevada reported before the caucuses on the presidential candidates' stances on water transfers (which usually require approval from presidential administrations), the mining law of 1872, or grazing fees? Nevada caucus campaign news coverage usually consisted of endless stories about personal appearances and campaign trivia. Issues coverage normally consisted of asking about Yucca Mountain and stopping there.

Earlier this month in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi wrote of how candidates allow themselves to be manipulated by reporters into pointless disputes like the Clinton/Obama clash over Lyndon Johnson and Martin King. Taibbi calls the reporters "merchants of trivia." But he also claimed that reporters naturally get "wrapped up in the horse race. It's inevitable. You tell me how you can spend nearly two years watching the dullest speeches known to man and not spend most of your time wondering about the one surefire interesting moment the whole thing has to offer: the ending."

I can think of another way of handling the boredom - take each candidate's 77 or however many pages and start covering their programs one by one. Scrutinize those programs, cost them out, and give the voter some idea of what they are and whether they'll work.