PENNSYLVANIA — While campaigns and aligned PACs are raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars, old-school, retail politics has yet to go out of style.
Gov. Mitt Romney’s five-day bus tour of six swing states ended Tuesday. The Pennsylvania portion included three stops on Saturday: a foundry and machine shop in the northeastern part of the state, a convenience store outside Philadelphia, and an historic site in south-central Pennsylvania.
Getting perhaps the best shot to elevate coverage of Romney’s Pennsylvania drive-through was The Patriot-News of Harrisburg. Patriot-News political reporter Robert Vickers was granted an “exclusive” sit-down with Romney and the chance to delve (or, at least dip) into areas of interest to voters across a wide swath of the central part of the state, where the paper is a key media source. (Efforts to reach Vickers to talk with him about the interview were unsuccessful.)
Such interviews present real challenges. Candidates are on a roll and a schedule. They’re hard to get off script and onto new ground. Reporters often have little time to prepare and little time with the candidate.
So, how did The Patriot-News use this opportunity—and handle the inherent challenges?
The paper’s resulting print story, published Sunday, was a fairly standard candidate-campaigns-in-state recap—quotes/assertions from Romney on the stump, quotes/assertions from a pro-Obama state representative and a teacher’s union official, with a few quotes from the paper’s Romney interview woven in, along with a few nice splashes of color like the following:
Looking something like a 2012 GOP Mount Rushmore, Romney, (Gov. Tom) Corbett, (Sen. Pat) Toomey and (former Minnesota Gov. Tim) Pawlenty basked in the crowd’s adoration, decked out in standard summer campaign khakis, blue jeans and Oxfords with rolled-up sleeves. Noticeably absent from the three visits was Pennsylvania’s former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, who had been dismissive of Romney’s conservative credentials when the two men vied for the Republican nomination.
In addition to providing fodder for the print story, Vickers’s interview with Romney was also broken into four video clips on four topics about which Vickers asked Romney—energy, transportation, taxes, and the importance of Pennsylvania to the Romney campaign. The videos were promoted in print and embedded on the paper’s website. A look at the clips offers a few basic lessons for all campaign reporters and editors going forward.
Vickers’s first question was about “coal and gas”—a key topic in energy-rich Pennsylvania. Vickers framed this in political terms, calling it “a contentious issue” and noting “we’ve got Democrats here who are advocating for a more expansive use of coal and gas while the president seems to be a little bit more restrictive there,” and then (the question-ish part) “wondering about” Romney’s “thoughts….and message to Democrats in Pennsylvania who are eager to see coal and gas tapped into.”
In other words: What’s your message to folks with whom in this instance you generally agree? Romney’s response, no surprise, was that he is also eager to “take advantage of the energy resources we have and they will help propel the economy,” noting that “by virtue of…horizontal drilling technologies and fracking, [natural gas] is now in abundance, it is very cheap.” Vickers’s question was open and unfocused—inviting as much in the answer. Romney was never confronted with the bigger issue for Pennsylvanians: how to balance the downsides of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas (wastewater disposal, road damage, and methane water quality challenges, for example) with the benefits of more available energy.
And so, a first lesson: Add value. Questions should be based on the knowledge that past positions are a given and build from that foundation. Asking something to which the answer is apparent does little to add value. Asking an open, unfocused question is an invitation to the candidate to revert to generalizations and talking points.
Vickers’s second question dealt with the sorry state of Pennsylvania’s roads and bridges. Specifically, he asked how a Romney administration would “help get infrastructure up to speed” in the state.
LOL...
It will be a snowy day in Hell when we see such a similar critique from an Obama interview. But let's see if we can imagine one?
Lesson 1: THE PAST IS THE PAST: Avoid confusing readers by delving into the candidate's past. Issues like drug use, and digging into his associations with radical churches and former terrorists cloud the issues by obscuring the otherwise upbeat and forward-looking tone of the interview. Same thing with his medical and student records and with all the charming little anecdotes in his books.
Lesson 2: CHALLENGE ASSERTIONS - Of all of Obama's opponents, of course.
Lesson 3. IGNORE THE MATH: What's a few trillion dollars here or there to the reader? We know what's good for them, and doing the math (for example by showing that Obamacare will cost taxpayers more than twice what Obama promised it would) only upsets the readers. Same thing with deficits, the unemployment rate, housing prices, wage stagnation, industrial output, etc, etc, etc. When Obama tells us that Obamacare will save the average American family $2500 a year, there's no need to break out the calculators.
Lesson 4: THE ANSWER IS THE ANSWER: We don't "dissect" anything and there is no need for a followup. When Obama speaks, we write (or genuflect). If he chooses not to take questions, be quiet and take dictation.
#1 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Wed 20 Jun 2012 at 10:08 PM
@padikiller. What you wrote is awesome, and not only that, it is SO true.
#2 Posted by NMLiberitarian, CJR on Thu 21 Jun 2012 at 01:43 PM
While I was surprised to read this single-voiced dissection of my article, I was stunned by the writer Ken Knelly's assertion that "efforts to reach Vickers to talk with him about the interview were unsuccessful."
Prior to this article, I'd never heard of Mr. Knelly, much less from him.
So I called.
Mr. Knelly told me that he'd sent a single email on June 20, the same day he posted his story about me to the CJR website. No follow-up email. No phone call. No message on Twitter. Mr. Knelly acknowledged as much when I called. Apparently, he sent one email, waited a few hours, then posted his criticisms of me. Here I would note the plural in Mr. Knelly's story: "efforts" to reach Vickers were unsuccessful.
If Mr. Knelly had been at any of the organizations that CJR regularly scrutinizes, he'd be in trouble with his editors. But not at CJR. When I called CJR, a subordinate editor informed me that CJR's media criticism is different from journalism and therefore does not adhere to industry standards.
That's something the broader journalism community ought to know.
As a veteran newspaper reporter and a former professor at the S.I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University, I understand criticism can be at once painful, but is also essential. Patriot-News editors and I would have welcomed the opportunity to elaborate for Mr. Knelly the context of my story and my video interview, and to discuss how both could have been improved. I was not afforded that opportunity because CJR - according to the CJR editor I spoke to - does not consider itself bound by the basic standards of journalism.
That, perhaps, has been the most useful education of all.
#3 Posted by Robert Vickers, CJR on Mon 9 Jul 2012 at 05:37 PM