“On the presidential side, the campaigns have regional or Michigan-based press staff who have been helpful with responses and access,” she said. “During the peak of the Michigan primary season, there was information overload coming from the campaigns. Sometimes, responses from campaigns can be very politically-charged emailed statements. It’s hard to cut through the rhetoric to drill down to something useful.”
Deploying resources: risk and reward
Todd Spangler, the Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Detroit Free Press, is covering his second full presidential campaign. He said that he would like to see “more analytical political coverage that drives deeper into the numbers, beyond the drive-by blurb of the day.”
“As a political reporter, would I like to see my newspaper do more polling? Yes. Would every political reporter in the country want their news organization to do more polling? Yes,” Spangler said.
Spangler’s reportorial wish-list also includes more staff time and money to pursue investigations that may not have clear stories waiting at the end of them: using computer-driven research to pore over Romney’s tax return, for example, or Obama’s campaign finance reports and see “who’s linked to what, who’s getting what.”
About those polls: the surveys are increasingly expensive, but when news organizations commission them, they know they’re guaranteed at least one front-page story, Spangler said. But if one or more reporters spend a month doing nothing but tracking, say, candidate connections to corporate investments, their editors don’t know if there will be a story in it at all. It’s a big risk for news organizations to take, even though the most revelatory stories emerge that way.
“It’d be great to have the people to do that (kind of reporting),” Spangler said. “But very few organizations in the country can really do it. Here in Washington, you have Politico and the Post, and even they are limited. If you’re a political junkie, you read Politico constantly because they hit every blurb, but they don’t always make the links to bigger stories. Even the [New York]) Times has to make hard decisions on where to spend their resources. So you can imagine how the Free Press does too.”
Because of that risk, reporters that do pursue open-ended investigations might feel pressured to inflate a story beyond its significance in order to justify the expense. But, Spangler said, “it’s the reporter’s job, and the editor’s job, to be honest about what you’ve got and not to overblow it, even though there’s always pressure there to get the biggest bang for your buck.”
The economy, and beyond
Spangler is particularly interested in how Obama’s portrayal of the government loans to the auto industry will play with Michigan voters. When I spoke with him during the week that Romney began to argue that he deserves a share of the creditfor the revival of the auto industry, Spangler said that he is “relatively certain” that Romney will put a lot of campaign resources into Michigan—“if nothing else than to force Obama to spend money there.”
But while the campaign coverage is likely to focus on the auto bailout loans and other economic priorities, Pluta said he worries about other issues being crowded out. He knows his listeners want the crucial news about jobs and recovery, Pluta said, but they also will be uniquely impacted by presidential policies on agriculture and the environment, particularly the Asian carp, a destructive invasive species in the Great Lakes. In past elections, news organizations put together packages that had a comparative focus on candidate stances on a range of issues. But “in 2008, 2010, and in 2012, it’s been all the economy, all the time,” Pluta said.
How ordinary people and checking the rhetoric go together
There was a common theme in every conversation I had: trying to connect the sometimes abstract or impenetrable world of politics to regular readers and listeners. “What’s frustrating to readers, said Jeff Taylor, political senior managing editor of the Free Press, “is when they don’t have the kind of real public dialogue with candidates … getting past that is at the core of our job.”
A teacher would be fired if her lectures were as unpredictable as the events the news media must investigate. This is one of two biggest reasons why surveys by the news media have shown repeatedly that the average American is too ignorant to vote intelligently. Thank God that most Americans don't vote must be the motto of reporters. Because no one in the news media is interested in communicating like a teacher. That is surprising because much of what reporters do is ineffective because they don;t want to change their "professional standards." Consider the tax code. It is full of special interest exemptions for the most powerful special interest groups because our political system rewards power. But if every daily newspaper would just publish a one page report on our tax code and distribution of income every year on April 15, ordinary people would be shocked and insulted by what they read. And then every year their anger will grow stronger if nothing is done to correct those flaws. And the April 15 one page report will become a deadline for politicians to do something. With the current professional standards for journalism, an shocking report on the tax code is forgotten by voters in a more colorful world of Weiner scandals et al. The news media lack of discipline in reporting information is the reason why the news media is ineffective. But no one cares. And that includes the intellectuals who work at CJR.
#1 Posted by Stanley Krauter, CJR on Tue 15 May 2012 at 12:13 PM