At 8 p.m. Tuesday, CNN will host a debate between Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on the future of health care in the United States. I don’t think anyone should watch it. In fact, we should protest its very existence. 

My reasoning is by no means an indictment of any party, candidate, idea or policy. Rather, it is an indictment of the ways in which our news media sources contrive a political spectacle, rather than a true political event, by pitting parties, candidates, ideas and policies against one another. 

One news source preemptively described the debate as a “cage match.” Another called it an “all-out political slugfest.” CNN is advertising the event as “Sanders vs. Cruz,” as though it’s little more than a wrestling match from which there will emerge a single bloody victor. 

But there will be no such victor. Members in the crowds on either of the two perceived “sides” of the debate — as CNN is constructing the complex and nuanced issue of health care policy to be a dichotomous winner-take-all game — will turn off their televisions at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday proud of the wrestler they had already picked to win.

The two sides of the crowd, ravenous for political entertainment, will become more deeply entrenched in their respective liberal or conservative bubbles, each darkening the lines of two circles in a Venn diagram that refuse to overlap. Those cheering for Sanders to clothesline Cruz will become more anti-Republican than ever. Those crying out for The Texan to body slam The Vermonter will become more anti-Democrat than ever. 

The talking heads providing the postgame analysis will argue over who threw the best punch.  

This carefully manufactured tension and meticulously fabricated groupthink is not what politics are for. In fact, it degrades the very basis of an informed republic. A true act or event of politics would not be constructed to divide the public, but to create a public. 

It’s no surprise that CNN and other major television news sources want to broadcast wrestling matches instead of reporting on politics. Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, wrote presciently over a decade ago that the quality of news media would degrade as news networks became more obsessed with profits and viewership. We are witnessing that very decline right now, and we must protest it for the sake of our politics.