A perfect example of the national media missing the nuance was the problem of illegal immigration. I was told over and over again how important this debate was for people in South Carolina, who are struggling economically and worried about the effects of globalization. But in both the Republican and Democratic primaries, the national media failed to reflect this struggle. The Republicans had their big South Carolina debate in Myrtle Beach, a vacation town that accounts for much of the state’s tourism revenue. Even though conservative voters are the majority here, there is also an understanding, in Myrtle Beach, that much of the service work that keeps the resorts functioning is done by illegal immigrant labor. Though some voters might take as simplistic a position as the candidates do on immigration (each tried to portray themselves in that debate as the strongest and most capable of keeping the border closed), for many voters it’s more complicated and nuanced than that. As for the Democrats, illegal immigration never even entered the conversation.

Part of the problem, as I observed it at least, is that when the national reporters arrive in a place like South Carolina, they rely for their information on local journalists like the ones I spoke with to give them a sense of the place and the issues that really matter. Though these journalists certainly have more of a finger on the pulse of what’s going on, going to them should not replace actually speaking with voters.

When I met up at that new Starbucks with Brad Warthen, the editorial page editor of The State who also blogs on the newspaper’s Web site, he had just finished an interview with the U.S. government-run Arabic station, Al-Hurra. He said he’d spent half of the last two weeks talking to everyone from the BBC to a Swedish journalist. He said he always tries to refer other journalists to some of his sources, local people who might give them an idea of what regular folks are thinking. He tried, for example, to direct reporters to a local evangelical businessman who was trying to find a candidate to support after Sam Brownback dropped out of the Republican race. But no one called.

Warthen laments the focus on identity politics, and thinks that, if anything, it’s the national media’s reading of the race as black and white that has influenced many in South Carolina to see it that way, too, where they might not have otherwise:

National media is all over the place, people are nowhere near as dependent on their local media for national news as they were even in the heyday of the three national networks. But they’re dependent on whatever that cheap soundbite, oversimplistic interpretation of events might be. And they are also blind to what is going on on the ground, in the main streets of their own communities. They know more about what’s going on with these interests groups fighting each other, these bitter partisan wars in Washington than they know what happened three blocks away. It’s really had a bad effect on politics. For one thing, people have lost the vocabulary to speak about politics in any other way than these yammering, shouting, partisans. That’s what they’ve learned because that’s what they get from 24-7 TV.

So if people voted based on their skin color and not on certain issues—something Warthen, like the other reporters I spoke to, didn’t assume would happen much—this has more to do with the characterization of the election on the cable news shows they were watching: “If everyone is saying black voters are thinking of certain things, to some extent, unless they consciously rebel against that, people who think of themselves in terms of their race, ethnicity, gender or whatever, may come to define themselves in terms of what they see people they identify with saying on television.”

The irony, as he sees it, is that when CNN or MSNBC asks him what South Carolinians are thinking, all he can do is repeat the narratives he hears from the voters he talks to, narratives they learned from watching CNN or MSNBC. The circle closes.

It’s easy to be cynical. I’m not saying that the news organizations have the resources to send reporters to do deep reporting in every state into which they will eventually parachute. But there should be a wariness of falling into easy, familiar narratives. Just because it’s the South, doesn’t mean race is going to dominate. As it happened, class was a much more significant dividing line between those who voted for Obama and those who chose Clinton (something I saw explained only in one very good Wall Street Journal article). At the very least, the results of the South Carolina primary, which defied racial expectations, should make reporters and their editors pause (yes, slow down!), reflect on all the speculation they engaged in beforehand, and think about how they might be able to do it better the next time they show up in South Carolina, in 2012.

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