Last Updated: December 29, 2000
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American voters
— unplugged
Connecting political coverage to readers
National politics might be an entertaining spectacle,
but readers connect with bread-and-butter regional issues
that change the way they live their lives.
By Mike Riley
If you want to make a list of the favorite platitudes of national political
reporters, one phrase rises to the top: All politics is local.
At one time or another, nearly every national scribe, with a suitably
somber face and furrowed brow, spits out that cliche, usually to explain
to the great unwashed some critical twist of the campaign season. Those
four magic words, which come to us courtesy of former Speaker of the House
Tip O’Neill, who knew a thing or two about the business, have long served
as a convenient catchall to explain a multitude of things political.
But here’s a confession: When I covered national politics for Time magazine,
I never fully appreciated the import of that phrase. It was only when I
moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia to become editor
of The Roanoke Times that the real meaning of that phrase became clear.
When my political prism shifted from national to local — a tectonic shift
in perspective — the power of O’Neill’s words came into sharp focus. The
chief lesson: Local is real; national is not. But more on that later.
Back in 1987, I fell into national political reporting when my boss
at Time called me from New York and asked if I wanted to cover the
upcoming presidential campaign. I nearly jumped out the window of the Los
Angeles bureau, and offered up (without hesitation, as I recall) a significant
body part for that golden opportunity.
During the next 12 years, I covered national politics in one way or
another. I crisscrossed the country with Michael Dukakis on Sky Pig, his
bargain-basement jet. I stared in awe at Bill Clinton in 1992 as
he survived Gennifer Flowers in New Hampshire. And then I created what’s
become the granddaddy of political Web sites, allpolitics.com, for Time
and CNN, which allowed me to watch, in grainy streaming video on my computer,
as President Clinton barely survived Monica Lewinsky.
Covering politics at the national level was a blast, and seemed, at
times, a grand game, almost too fun to be real. The personalities were
fascinating, the stories gripping, the scandals momentous. In many ways,
national politics — at least as we understand and report it — is pure theater,
an entertaining spectacle played out largely inside the beltway amphitheater,
with cameo appearances at key venues across the nation. On the TV news,
the leading politicians have become protagonists, the distant cardboard
cutouts who spout out sound bites.
The traditional formula we use to cover national politics — heavy on
spectacle and light on substance (with enough token issues coverage thrown
in along the way to pretend that we’re taking it all quite seriously) —
feeds that sense of disconnection, defined by the inability of politicians
and citizens to carry on meaningful dialogues. In a presidential campaign,
for example, real connections are possible only in a few places — namely
Iowa and New Hampshire — and after that the campaign moves into a cocoon,
with journalists acting as somewhat awkward and obfuscating filters. So
it’s easy to get dispirited while covering that superficial sort of campaign.
In hopes that the Internet offered an opportunity to reconnect these
disparate parties, I jumped at the chance in 1995 to build and run allpolitics.com,
which I thought offered a high-tech chance to bridge that great disconnect.
The idea was to cover all the political news, as broadly and as deeply
as we could. We would have no more pure fluff at the expense of substance.
Because we weren’t constrained by newsprint costs or airtime, we had a
virtually unlimited ability to focus on issues we thought were important.
So, in addition to covering the stories of the day, we could spend time
exploring not-so-sexy-but-darned-important issues such as welfare and campaign
finance reform. The site featured lots of interactivity, including message
boards and chat rooms, which we hoped would build communities of interest
and start reconnecting people to the political process. Traffic grew and,
when we posted the first real-time election results on line during election
night 1996, we glimpsed the huge impact and potential of politics on the
Internet.
But not everyone saw our potential as clearly. The site failed to bring
in much money, and corporate interest waned. Then came the Lewinsky story
which, while it drove millions of page views each day, also confirmed that
the soap opera of politics could once again trump any notions of substance.
When I drove to work those mornings, I literally dreaded spending another
day covering the sordid saga, knowing people seemed far more concerned
about the latest titillation than about any story of import.
That was about the time I headed to Roanoke, trading the nomadic life
of covering national news for a close-knit community where my family and
I could put roots down. And it was here that I began to finally understand
just what Tip O’Neill was talking about.
Politicians here aren’t cardboard cutouts (though some of them are certainly
characters); nor are they the daily butt of David Letterman jokes. Instead,
they’re the real thing. You run into them while shopping at the City Market
or eating at The Roanoker restaurant. They live down the street. Their
kids go to school with your kids. There is a human scale to these politicians
— they’re approachable — and they like it that way. So do their constituents,
who are our readers, and that means we cover politics in a radically different
way.
We avoid publishing horserace stories (for the most part), along with
the rumors, the gossip and innuendo. Here, politics is not a sport or an
entertainment, which meant that the Clinton impeachment news rarely made
the front page.
Instead, our coverage of politics is defined by issues that hit home,
that touch the lives of our readers. We closely cover the city council,
whether it’s wrestling with a water shortage or creating a ruckus by changing
the date for trick-or-treating. We keep a close eye on our state legislators
as they battle for regional road projects, argue about whether high
school students can carry hunting rifles in their trucks on school property,
or try to find ways to help laid-off textile workers. These are bread-and-butter
issues with real regional impact, and that’s what we want to cover on our
pages.
In Roanoke, we waited a long time before putting presidential primary
stories on the front page, even though we played plenty of them inside.
There were days when I had to muffle my love of national politics to keep
from pressing to play more of these political stories more prominently.
I realized, however, that most of our readers simply weren’t hungry for
them and that we could use the news hole in far better ways.
When George W. Bush came through our town, we certainly covered him.
And our reporters wrote a few on-the-ground-with-local-organizers stories,
but otherwise we relied on wire service reports. We’d troll through wire
copy, however, looking for meaningful analysis rather than coverage
of the controversy of the day. In the fall, we will focus primarily on
the already antagonistic Robb-Allen senate race. This hits home with our
audience. We’ll track the presidential race through the wires.
At this level, it’s possible to see more clearly how representative
democracy is meant to work. It’s good for politicians to live in
the community and rub shoulders with constituents, rather than spending
much of their time courting deep-pocketed donors. That closeness builds
a fair amount of accountability, because people can reach out and touch
their politicians to keep them in line.
The newspaper’s role is straightforward: Keep the conversation honest
by closely following politics as it touches the lives of real people. That’s
a sharply focused litmus test for our coverage, and most of the time it
works well. I’m sure there’s some sagacious Greek philosopher who put it
better, but it’s clear that democracy works best when the distance between
the governors and the governed is least.
So on the way from Washington to Roanoke, I’ve learned plenty of journalistic
lessons:
• Local politics is real and human and immensely complex. It has a direct
and powerful impact on people’s lives. It deserves serious, sustained coverage.
• The newspaper has a responsibility to cover all the important issues
and to explain their impact in a meaningful way. That’s a purpose easily
shirked at the national level. The stakes here are high, because if we
fail to cover our politics well, nobody else will.
• Readers here want hard results and understanding, not entertainment.
They care deeply about the future of their region, and their concern keeps
both the newspaper and politicians honest.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I haven’t given up on the Internet. I’m still
rooting for it to revolutionize politics in 2000, or 2004, or 2008, and
I know it will one day allow us to play a more powerful role in this region.
While I’d love to see the Internet empower and connect people in the best
possible ways, the odds of that happening immediately are pretty slight.
So, for right now, I know I’m in a place where the daily newspaper can
have plenty of impact, and that’s a great feeling.
(This article originally appeared in Nieman Reports and is reprinted
with permission. Copyright Nieman Reports, 2000.)
Riley, a former bureau chief for Time and Executive Producer of allpolitics.com,
is editor of The Roanoke (Va.) Times.
