(FORTUNE Magazine) – One of the notable things about the presidential primaries so far is the largely superficial treatment given to the candidates' economic views. Charges and countercharges about tax reform, tax cuts, and Social Security ricochet around the media, but there's been very little informed analysis of the candidates' positions.

The purest example is network television, where the level of economic debate has been so low that it's almost immeasurable. Which candidate's multitrillion-dollar Social Security plan is serious? Which is nonsense? Does anyone know? Don't ask the networks.

The Media Research Center, an Alexandria, Va., watchdog group, will soon release a study showing just how bad it is. The MRC reviewed the top three TV networks' evening news shows from Aug. 1, 1999, through January 2000--the six months leading up to the New Hampshire primary. It picked out all the segments that concerned the primaries, and then noted all the references to taxes, Social Security, and related economic issues. Out of the hundreds of segments, only 36 dealt in whole or in substantive part with these kinds of fiscal issues.

Now, the MRC is a conservative outfit and has its own (pro-tax cut) agenda, so three of the main conclusions it draws from the study reflect its beefs: First, the nets largely ignored Steve Forbes' ambitious flat-tax proposal (unlike in 1996, when they paid it lots of attention). By "dismissing Forbes," the MRC says, "the networks were also excluding the most conservative tax-reduction plan from the news agenda." Second, George W. Bush's tax-cut plan was repeatedly labeled "big" and "huge" and was often accompanied by Democratic criticisms that it was "irresponsible." Third, the nets never questioned John McCain's assertion that a smaller tax cut was essential to protecting and preserving Social Security. This is all typical, true, and fair enough to point out--and also pretty easy to ignore unless you're addicted to the arcana of fiscal party politics.

But the study's fourth major conclusion is one that should concern anybody seriously interested in economics and public policy. The MRC found that in all of the 36 economics-related segments, which included 58 "talking head" interviews, not a single economist was quoted during the entire six months. Observes Bernard Saffran, a professor at Swarthmore College who monitors the media for The Journal of Economic Perspectives: "It's hard to imagine how you could have a serious discussion of Social Security without talking to people like Martin Feldstein [Harvard], Peter Diamond [MIT], and Henry Aaron [Brookings Institution], who have written extensively about it and are intimately familiar with the details of the various proposals."

It's not that economists are any more boring or inaccessible or incomprehensible than experts in other fields. The most likely reason they've been kept off TV, in the words of Richard Noyes, who directed the MRC study, is that "the media are much more fascinated by the process of campaign 2000 and less interested in the issues."

Bonfire of the Bonds

Finally, after 40 years of deficit spending and a nasty patch in the 1980s when the national debt threatened to turn the U.S. into the world's biggest banana republic, the government gets its act together and begins running surpluses. Not only that, but the surpluses come in bigger than anyone predicted, and--amazingly--if the near future is much like the recent past, the Treasury estimates we could pay off the national debt by 2013.

What's not to like? Well, it turns out some people are very upset: Wall Street bond traders, of all people. As the news sank in in February, heralded by the Treasury's announcement that it would buy back many of its 30-year bonds, traders wrung their hands. How will they price bonds if the 30-year benchmark is gone? What will they do if--gasp--there are no more government bonds to trade? The answer, of course, is that they'll do what they used to before the mountain of federal debt built up: trade corporate bonds and come up with another bellwether by which to measure the market. Get a life, guys. If the stock market can do it, so can you. Maybe some of those quants can figure it out.