politics

Breathing Life Into the Dreaded Issue Story

June 28, 2004

It’s difficult to find too many people — inside or outside of journalism — who don’t periodically profess the noble view that the campaign press should place a greater focus on issues. The reason those preachments don’t translate to better coverage is fairly obvious: News is a bottom-line oriented business, and news consumers, whether willing to admit it or not, are often more interested in the horse race, the tales of backroom machinations of politicians, and the occasional whiff of scandal than they are the issues. Consequently, the editors at media organizations who live or die by circulation figures and ratings — and that would be most of them — have little patience for issue-oriented reporters eager to write learned tomes on where each candidate stands on, say, early childhood education for the handicapped, or irrigation subsidies to corporate farmers.

So the challenge for diligent reporters is to package issue-oriented stories in ways that are appealing to the public and to their editors (who imagine themselves proxies for the public) — appealing enough to displace the less substantive efforts competing for placement. And that isn’t always easy. That’s why we applaud The Washington Post‘s Ceci Connolly and Jonathan Weisman for their piece today, which clearly paints “the choice for voters” as one built around issues — even if the piece itself pushes aside some of the nuances of the candidates’ policies. In this media environment, we’re willing to sacrifice a little nuance if it means that informative pieces like this find their way onto page A1.

Here’s how Connolly and Weisman lay it out. On the one hand, voters (the ones motivated primarily by domestic policy issues, anyway) who favor expanded health care coverage are likely to vote for Kerry, who is pushing a health insurance package that would, among other initiatives, provide coverage for an additional 27 million people. Voters who favor making permanent the tax cuts enacted during Bush’s first term are, obviously enough, probably going to vote to reelect the president, who has pledged $990 billion over a decade to do so. Bush’s health plan is far more modest than Kerry’s, and Kerry favors rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for households with income of over $200,000, cuts Bush wants to make permanent.

Of course, as Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt points out in the piece, “it’s not a binary choice.” But it is a clear-cut contrast between the two candidates, one that goes beyond the tired storylines being pushed by the campaigns — that one candidate is a “flip-flopper” who can’t be pinned down on any issue and that the other is the tool of special interests getting rich at the expense of the rest of us.

So we see the Connolly-Weisman effort, however simplistic it might seem to a policy wonk, as a flicker of light in a dark wood. If the press can crank out accessible stories like this and get readers to think about where they stand on real issues (and then vote accordingly), then at least a few reporters can congratulate themselves for doing good while also doing well.

–Brian Montopoli

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Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.