Election coverage should be about issues not polling and fund-raising.
By: Hank Kalet
Good piece in Slate on "the folly of horse-race journalism" or the kind of journalism that focuses on who is ahead in the polls and who is behind and not on what the candidates have to say or what they believe in.
It would seem, from my lowly vantage point here in the suburbs of New Jersey that what you want from your political coverage is a sense of what the candidates plan to do if they win office.
For instance, I want to know which candidate is likely to send us to war, which one is against the death penalty, which one would liberalize America’s drug laws and so on.
As a local editor, these are the kinds of questions on which I encourage my reporters to focus (they might replace the word "encourage" with "force," but that is neither here nor there). I want to tell our readers what the candidates would do about development, what they would do about preserving open space, taxes and traffic.
We never write about the race for cash that the major media seems so obsessed with an obsession that allows them to "call" the Democratic presidential primary and write off candidates a full six months before Democrats caucus in Iowa.
William Saletan in his Slate piece asks why, for instance, the press makes fund-raising and polling the story and not the contradictory statements made by Richard Gephardt’s stance on Iraq.
"Why does the press cover fund-raising instead of probing questions like these? Because money is measurable," he writes (I would add that following the polls and fund-raising as opposed to asking the tough questions lets both the reporters and the candidates off the hook). "You can say that Dean beat Kerry, or that Gephardt fell short of his stated goal, without being accused of bias. But the minute reporters start judging candidates based on policies, qualifications, or character, they get spanked. Never mind that these are precisely the standards by which voters think they should judge the candidates. The defining myth of American journalism is that it’s subjective to call a candidate good or bad, but it’s objective to call him a loser.
"Well, it isn’t. Some statements are false, some ideas are better than others, and calling a candidate a loser before the first vote has been cast is the surest way to kill him. I’m sure my colleagues in the press are surprised that Gephardt raised less money than he said he would. But I bet they’re really angry that the figure he reported to the government on July 15 is $700,000 less than the estimate he put out two weeks earlier, when they were writing their first batch of stories about the second-quarter money totals. The Los Angeles Times, with typical faux
objectivity, calls that discrepancy "a disappointment." It wasn’t a disappointment. It was a lie. And we’d be a lot more truthful if we just said so."