DENVER, CO — While the midterms are over here in America’s favorite swing state, that doesn’t mean reporters are taking a breather from political coverage. They’re writing stories about what happened: how the Republican wave crashed on the Rockies (Democratic Sen. Mark Udall lost, while incumbent Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper held on), how the GOP’s ground game, the state’s new election laws, and dynamic candidates disrupted a decade of Democratic rule, and how whatever narrative is gelling might not be accurate depending on how you look at it.
And yesterday, on the campus of the University of Colorado in downtown Denver, five of the state’s top political journalists showed up for a panel discussion on the highs and lows of campaign coverage this year and took questions from an audience of about 40. Jason Salzman, a communications consultant, blogger and former media critic for the defunct Rocky Mountain News, moderated the panel with conservative consultant Kelly Maher of Compass Colorado. The University of Colorado’s School of Public Affairs also sponsored the event.
Below are some highlights from the discussion:
Candidates controlled the narrative — but they shouldn’t
This campaign season in Colorado was a little different, said political reporter Peter Marcus of The Durango Herald, because of the very narrow agendas of the campaigns, particularly in the US Senate race. “What did we have one narrative, maybe two narratives? The biggest obviously being the War on Women and all of that — we’re talking about Gardner and Udall especially — and so you just had the reporting, the fodder, the attacks, everything, was relegated to within this one narrative.”
For Associated Press reporter Nick Riccardi, that was part of the reason he didn’t feel he was able to report on the Colorado campaigns as best he could this year. For better or worse, he said, a lot of coverage reflected the choices made by campaigns.
“I tried to think outside the box as much as I could, but I didn’t do as much as I should,” he said. “I think that’s maybe a reflection of my failings, but also I think that it is a reminder that campaigns set the narrative, campaigns have a fair amount of power over what gets published and what doesn’t … There’s a lot that we could have done that didn’t get written … it’s hard to do those stories inside that structure of the campaign.” It was apparently a learning experience. For the next big election, Riccardi said he plans to “just walk away from the whole circus” and try to find stories outside the scripted campaign schedule. (In October, I touched on some of this for CJR; you can read about earlier coverage of the Colorado gubernatorial race here, and the Senate race here).
Moderator Salzman made the obvious point: “You hope that journalists step in and ask questions that are aggressive to move the debate.”
Harder for female reporters to get tough with a candidate?
Not surprisingly, there was discussion about a now legendary interview segment in which Eli Stokols of KDVR in Denver pressed Republican US Senate candidate Cory Gardner on why he didn’t support a state personhood ballot measure but did support federal personhood legislation — the candidate said four times there is no federal personhood bill, which prompted Stokols to cite Factcheck.org and say at one point, “Do you really think that just telling me that it’s not a personhood bill makes it not?” Denver’s CBS Channel 4 reporter Shaun Boyd said it would have been hard for her to take a similar approach.
“I think when a female reporter does that, frankly, I don’t think she’s viewed as tough as much as she’s viewed as a b-word,” Boyd said.
Colorado media gave down ballot races the shaft
While the marquee races for governor, US Senate and Congress took up plenty of ink and broadband, the down ballot races for statewide office and the legislature got short shrift. The Denver Post‘s politics editor, Chuck Plunkett, said if the paper had more resources he would have liked the opportunity to dispatch reporters to better cover the battle over the state Senate, which flipped to the Republicans this year. “We didn’t really cover the secretary of state race, we didn’t really cover the treasurer’s race, or the attorney general’s race, to the degree that I would have liked to have done it,” he said.
This was also the case in the TV world. CBS4’s Boyd said she wished she’d been able to cover legislative races earlier in the season and explain to viewers why they mattered.
“I thought often about going out to rural areas where the economy is not as strong and maybe covering stories out there, too,” Boyd said. Instead, she ended up spending more time fact-checking TV ads for the station’s Reality Check segment. “Frankly, it’s easier for the station. They’ve got an editor who can edit the piece, and we don’t have to go out and shoot anything. And we are always, every single day, short on photographers … this year in particular I felt like I did so much Reality Check and less of the reporting out in the field.”
Less investigative journalism
“I don’t know that there’s one particular story that I feel like I didn’t report on but would have liked to…I felt like this election cycle was sort of void of …some of that hard-hitting investigative journalism,” said Peter Marcus of the Durango Herald. “That being said, I mean, you were dealing with vetted candidates … these are career politicians.”
Bored on the bus
KDVR’s Eli Stokols on covering the modern professional campaign:
Unfortunately there were very few days where I sat there and I said, ‘Absolutely have to shoot this today,’ because it was so rare that these candidates were actually available, putting out public schedules, doing public events… I rode on the Udall bus, I went up to Fort Collins and Greeley a couple times to find Cory [Gardner] when he was speaking to Republicans there, and you know, you would get the same rehearsed, trite lines from all of them. And when you sat them down in an interview you got the same rehearsed, trite lines from both. And so maybe it is incumbent on us to be better, to push them out of their comfort zone a little bit … I think that’s the tough part of the modern campaign. Campaigns with money are so not reliant anymore on mainstream media to get their message out, especially in a market like this [in Colorado] where there is not such a critical mass of media.
The Denver Post didn’t want to cover ‘scripted theater’
Post politics editor Plunkett said his paper didn’t want to fall into the trap of covering what he called the “scripted theater” of the campaigns. So in the early spring, he said, he gathered staff for multiple substantive discussions about issues they wanted to address this election season, so they weren’t just “having to chase the Twitter around, having to chase the horse race around.” Some of the issues they decided to focus on were immigration, the ground game, and money, and how candidates evolved on issues. Also, for the first time, the paper held its own recorded debates in its auditorium instead of partnering with a TV station.
‘Insane paucity’ of reporters in Colorado
Responding to an audience member’s question about the dwindling media landscape in Colorado — The Rocky Mountain News folded in 2009, The Denver Post‘s newsroom has shrunk — the AP’s Riccardi said there is an “insane paucity” of news outlets in Colorado. KDVR’s Stokols said the issue has been compounded by gifted reporters with institutional knowledge of Colorado politics leaving the state for jobs elsewhere. As for The Denver Post’s recent troubles, “It’s been horrible to watch,” Plunkett said.
Didn’t approve this ad
CBS4’s Boyd provided some levity when she spoke of how she’d recoiled at seeing her on-air reporting appear in a political ad on TV. To her dismay, her station ran the ad on its airwaves. But, she said, other TV stations in Denver didn’t air it because they didn’t want to highlight the reporting of a competitor.
