Election 2008: Remote in hand
Like many of you, I spent last Tuesday night with remote in
hand switching back and forth between cable stations trying to keep up with
results from the New Hampshire primary. After leaving the rush of daily
journalism, covering elections is one of the assignments I really miss. But during
this election cycle, I have been disgusted with the coverage more than I have
been longing to rejoin my colleagues.
We often talk about diversity on this site. I have long
thought that we would get to truly diverse coverage much faster if we just
stuck to one of the tenets many of us learned in journalism schools or at our
first jobs: report factually as much as possible and interview with a wide net.
But so far in this election, there have been many cases where we haven’t done
that. Here are five of the most glaring examples I’ve seen.
- As the results from Iowa
came in nearly two weeks ago, I listened as cable anchors and their guests
talked of the impact of Barack Obama winning in a mostly white state. Some
spoke of how far race relations had evolved. I’m not arguing that there
has not been evolvement on the race front, but let’s keep our feet on the
planet Earth when reporting about it. Obama won 38 percent of the delegate
vote; Edwards won 30 percent; Clinton, Richardson and Biden, combined, won
32 percent. That’s a plurality for Obama, not a majority. That means that
most of the delegate votes in this mostly white state did not go to Obama.
They went to a white man or a white woman. But none of the anchors or
pundits I watched on the night of Iowa’s primary was able to detach
themselves from the group hug long enough to point this out.
- I’ve cringed over the
references to Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. (I’ll
have much more to say about this in my Tuesday blog, which falls on King’s
birthday.) For now, I’ll suffice it
to say that whenever any politician attaches himself/herself to King,
compares himself/herself to King or mentions himself/herself in the same
sentence as King we should be wary. Outside of reporting about what
candidates say, journalists should be very careful about making
comparisons between a mission that involved people fighting hoses, dogs
and nooses daily, and a political campaign.
- I heard or read several
reporters mention Hillary’s tears, but I didn’t see a tear. Many
journalists later cleaned it up a bit, saying she became emotional, but
that was long after she became known as a crier. Some (including headline
writers) went ahead with the crying label because it sounded good, even
though it wasn’t accurate.
- Much has already been
written about the problems with the polling before the New Hampshire
primary. But the important thing for journalists to remember is to not get
caught up in the polling no matter which way it’s going. We want to be
careful not to call elections weeks before the actual elections are held.
- On a similar subject, we
as journalists must be careful to remember to go to the people we are
covering not the pundits. It’s sometimes hard to get the pundits out of
our heads, but we’ve got to remember to listen to the folks on the
corners, in the bars and at the grocery stores. What are they thinking? Do
they see and hear the same things that Pat Buchanan, Tim Russert or
Clarence Page see and hear?
These are some of my
thoughts on elections and fair reporting. Please share yours.
Curtis Lawrence is a journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago.clawrence@colum.edu