There are two worlds in politics, the real and the stage-managed. Reporters ceaselessly seeking the angle of the moment can easily become tools of the stage managers. But every once in a while, real life collides with story-hour. It happened this week as John Kerry toured the Rust Belt – parts of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
If you were depending on The New York Times, the Washington Post or TV news to keep you abreast of raging issues on the campaign trail, you’d be convinced that the whole world was fretting and debating about what John Kerry actually did with those Vietnam combat medals lo those many years ago. After all, if the bigfoots of the national press keep telling you this is REALLY BIG NEWS, why, then, it must be so.
Unless…well, unless the voters don’t give a hoot. (Pause now with nostalgia to recall Howard Dean’s utter domination of campaign press coverage… right up until the moment that the voters finally spoke.)
And, in the case of Kerry and the medals, as Jill Lawrence of USA Today writes today, many voters out there don’t care. Oddly enough, they’re more concerned about their own real-life daily struggle to find and hang on to scarce jobs and fleeting health insurance. And that’s the story that the local print and broadcast media, who fly a little closer to the ground than the Washington press corps, are covering with gusto this week, from Toledo to Youngstown to Wheeling.
Take this week, for example, as Kerry made his way through the region. Fritz Wenzel of the Toledo Blade detailed at length Kerry’s “Job’s First” initiative and its implications for the hard-hit Rust Belt states that are up for grabs in November.
The Youngstown Vindicator’s David Skolnick and Peter H. Milliken reported Kerry’s pledge to “rebuild America by strengthening the economy and putting Americans across this country back to work.” And Tom Diana of Wheeling’s News-Register quoted Kerry declaring the Bush administration’s elimination of steel tariffs to be “a mistake.”
Controversies-of-the-moment, fabricated or otherwise, wax and wane inside the Beltway. Out in the real world, concerns are a little different, and that’s why it’s encouraging to find local reporters who have their fingers on the local pulse, instead of knuckle-deep in whatever the mud pie of the week is for reporters whose idea of an excursion is the New York-to-Washington shuttle.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.