A testable hypothesis

Glenn Greenwald sets forth what I think is a testable hypothesis:

It's a genuinely good thing that we continue to elect our leaders by voting, but one is remiss if one fails to take note of just how profoundly limited and lacking is the discourse that surrounds that process. There really is an almost complete, inverse relationship between a policy's significance and the level of debate to which it's subjected: that is, the more significant the policy is, the less political debate and media attention it receives. So not only do our most destructive policies continue regardless of the outcome of our elections, they continue without any real democratic deliberation at all.

Somebody should do this study. Identify about thirty areas of policy debate. Rank them in significance (this is the subjective part, but one should be able to do this at least on a rough basis - perhaps a panel of "experts" could do the scoring), and then measure the amount of media attention devoted to each. My guess is that Greenwald is right and that the more important the subject the less it is debated.