Last Updated: February 03, 2000
Printer-friendly version
By the conventions next summer, we'll have known who
the nominees were for months - this winter is the real campaign season.
So we asked editors inside and outside the Beltway about their plans now
and to ponder other aspects of coverage...
Editors plan evolutionary improvement in coverage,
not a revolution
First, a stroll down memory lane:
In 1994, in the wake of Gennifer Flowers (remember Gennifer?), Bill
Phillips and I were completing research for a report on political coverage
for The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center.
The best advice we gathered was neatly summed up by a focus group of
level-headed citizens of Spring Hill, Tenn. They told us:
If you know about it, we want to know about it. Don't censor information.
But make sure:
It's fact, not rumor or speculation.
It's kept in proportion to its significance. (If you find out about
another Clinton girlfriend, make it an item in the People column. We already
know he fools around.)
You don't beat the story to death. Tell the story, then get on to
other news.
Bill, then a political consultant, and I reported these sensible suggestions
in "Nothing Sacred: Journalism, Politics and Public Trust in a Tell-All
Age" and the reports were sent off with hope and best wishes to newsrooms
nationwide.
Then along came Monica Lewinsky and KA-BOOM!
But like Schroeder in the pumpkin patch awaiting the Great Pumpkin,
we look to the next round of political coverage, heartened by the hopes
and plans of editors across the country.
2000 ELECTION COVERAGE
Editors want to see more bottom-up coverage with readers pointing the
way to story angles and questions for candidates. Editors want to focus
on candidates' responses to issues rather than the horse race. And the
number of serious contenders means there are more newspapers covering hometown
candidates.
On the whole, newspaper editors feel their previous coverage was worthy
of building on rather than dumping and creating from scratch.
For this story, editors were asked what their plans are for presidential
election coverage, how they will differ from the past, what use they will
make of the Internet and: "If a major who's-bedding-whom, who's-snorting-what
story breaks, how will your coverage mirror or break from your coverage
of the Monica Lewinsky story? How much control over a national story do
you feel you have in your newspaper?"
A DETAILED PLAN
One of the most detailed plans, incorporating many of the goals cited
by other editors, came from Tim McGuire, editor and senior vice president
of news media for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. He said the paper will
"follow our '96 coverage approach, which was: Shy away from coverage of
strategy and gamesmanship, and concentrate on what the candidates are saying;
what their qualifications are; their past record and performance; their
plans for the future.
"I think we accomplished much of this in '96 by using the wires to cover
the day-to-day developments on the campaign trail and our own reporters
to do supplemental coverage geared to our readers.
"The heart of the staff-produced work in '96 was an issues series that
took a bottom-up approach and focused on the things that drive peoples'
lives and what they hope for and expect from their elected officials. For
example, instead of doing a top-down package on crime, we wrote about the
insecurity people feel in their lives - insecurity about their communities,
their jobs, their children, their values - and how that issue related to
the campaign."
"For 2000 we are planning a series of packages, written by beat reporters,
that will explore how the major candidates would address key challenges,
issues and problems facing the United States and Minnesota in the new millennium.
(Some examples: How to cope with coming demographic changes? How do we
keep the U.S. a leader in science and technology? How do we deal with race
relations? And so on.) We then will take the candidates' proposals to Minnesota
experts in various fields and ask them to assess the proposals."
And something peculiar, shall we say, to Minnesota: "We are also working
on following the national campaign using a forum of Ventura voters."
THE LOCAL ANGLE
For several papers, the excitement is having a hometown or just-down-the-road
candidate in the race.
"George W. Bush's candidacy makes the presidential race a local story
in some senses for the El Paso (Texas) Times," said Editor and Publisher
Don Flores. "Bush devoted a lot of resources to El Paso in 1998 in an attempt
to become the first Republican gubernatorial candidate to carry El Paso.
The emphasis that Bush, Gore and other candidates have placed on the Hispanic
vote also makes the presidential race more of a 'local' story than it has
been in the past."
"George Bush is our hometown boy, so we're staffing his side of the
campaign heavily," said Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman.
"We have three staffers ... on the road with him. We're not hitting every
trip, but many, and that frequency will increase.
"We've got very good people and we give them maximum latitude on stories.
A reporter on the hoof usually has better judgment than an editor steering
a desk in a glass office. While we've got lots of issues pieces done or
planned-the education writer doing Bush/Gore education, etc.-we'd rather
keep the 'plan' fluid almost to the point of nonexistence. I like news,
and it's hard to plan the news."
THE OTHER LOCAL ANGLE
For most editors, the critical factor is what the voters in their area
are concerned about, and they are getting at those issues in several ways.
"Among our examples are Texans Talk, The People's Agenda, a device that
focuses on what voters say is their top concern, not what the politicians
say it is," said Mark Edgar, political editor at The Dallas Morning News.
"The response has been overwhelmingly positive. ... An example of a new
series for 2000 is called Campaign of Ideas, which looks at what the candidates
offer as new, cutting edge, bold. We will highlight what the candidates
consider their best idea, not a rewritten solution to nagging problems
but something that may truly be innovative."
Peter Bhatia, executive editor of The Oregonian in Portland, said they
plan to follow their general plan from the 1996 election, "but for us that
means we cover primarily local and regional angles as compared to traveling
around with the national candidates. We have focused our coverage for the
past few elections on the issues and have worked very hard to avoid the
horse race. We run extensive voter guides (grids with the issues defined
and the candidate responses) from the lowliest local race to the loftiest
national race."
"We plan to cover the campaign differently," said Brian Toolan, editor
of the Hartford (Conn.) Courant, "not so much because we've found great
fault with what we've done in the past but because we believe the electorate
will be more demanding than anytime in the recent past, and we want to
probe that."
"Our premise is," Toolan said, that "voters or potential voters are
more aware and conversant with the issues than ever before yet wary of
the process. We're also wondering if a goodly portion of the electorate
has been made weary by reports and admissions of scandal, and the impeachment
process. If so, how will that weariness manifest itself? What does it mean
for candidates?"
The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle asked the community to submit questions
that reporters could pose to candidates, said Executive Editor Dennis Sodomka.
"When we did that with a mayoral election in '99 we saw the biggest voter
turnout in memory. Though it likely wasn't due entirely to our coverage,
I'm sure it helped heighten awareness to the importance of each person's
vote.
"Use of wire coverage likely will be the same, although our company's
Morris News Service will provide us some coverage of the national campaign
that we will use heavily. One thing we will be doing is reporting heavily
on the primaries in Georgia and South Carolina."
John Armstrong, editor and vice president/news for the Contra Costa
Newspapers in Walnut Creek, Calif., is figuring on greater interest in
the 2000 election: "Most jurisdictions have moved their elections from
odd years to November of even years, which means we'll have an exceptionally
heavy line-up next fall. And California has emerged as a bigger player
in the primaries."
Bill Nangle, executive editor of The Times, in Hammond, Ind., plans
"to carefully select three families representative of the region and report
the election campaign through their views. Northwest Indiana is a mix of
urban, suburban, 'rurban' and rural. It is an ethnic melting pot. This
gives the Times an opportunity to present its readers unique insight to
the real world thinking of real people representing widely divergent voices
but who will all respond to the national campaign. We intend for the coverage
to be more issue based, less personality driven."
The Rockford (Ill.) Register Star, said Linda Grist Cunningham, executive
editor, creates a statewide voters panel to establish the most critical
issues for Illinois and editorial board agenda for similar critical issues:
"We use both the issues and agendas set by the voters panel and the editorial
board to guide, at least in broad strokes, the enterprise coverage during
the election and to ensure that we remain focused on the issues most important
to our readers."
The Chicago Tribune "probably will not devote the same level of resources
to the 2000 campaign because we had a convention in Chicago during 1996,
an event that prompted us to ramp up our coverage significantly," said
James O'Shea, deputy managing editor/news. "Nevertheless, we plan to provide
the level of coverage to which our readers have become accustomed. Since
most of our election stories are staff written, we will use the same amount
of national, local and wire copy as before."
"Campaign spending is a major issue in Wisconsin and we have written
extensively about it," said Dave Zweifel, The Capital Times, Madison, Wis.
"We will give our readers as much as we can about the money behind the
candidates and the probable quid pro quos that that money represents."
ROLES OF THE INTERNET
Editors noted some of the uses they will make of the Internet, but it
doesn't seem to be emerging as a major force in this election. And one
editor notes that it can drag down the coverage.
"The Internet," said Brian Toolan in Hartford, "will be a forum for
endless political discourse, a fraction of it even meaningful. It will
provide candidates an unfiltered interface with voters; we need to be aware
of that connection. Some of the worthy journalism and political analysis
will come by way of it; we need to be aware of that."
"We are hoping to do more in both wire and locally generated copy on
the expectations that there will be more interest in a wide-open race than
what happened with the Dole-Clinton coronations in 1996," said Tim Morris,
state/political editor, at The Times-Picayune in News Orleans. "We have
an affiliated Web site that runs a lot of reader forums, links to campaign
finance material, etc. The Internet is a great research tool, and we'll
try to do as much as we can to let our readers know what's available."
Craig Klugman, editor of The Journal Gazette, Fort Wayne, Ind., said:
"Our problems have always been how to make local races interesting. The
candidates are sometimes lackluster and the issues of narrow interest.
Sometimes the politics of the race are more interesting, but that's always
a tougher thing to get a handle on."
The Internet will play a role, Klugman said: "A lot on campaign finance
stuff. A lot on issues of the candidates. A lot on reader interactivity.
A lot of links from our home page."
"The El Paso Times is already making use of the Internet to cover campaign
finance issues," Don Flores said. "We're able to track how much money people
in our readership area are giving to national candidates and explain why
that's important to our readers."
The flip side of the Internet was expressed by James O'Shea in Chicago.
For the most part, he feels the Tribune has control over the national stories
its publishes: "The only slippage I detect in control over national news
has to do with the Internet and the emergence of the 'lowest common denominator'
phenomenon, 'columnists' such as Matt Drudge. At times, an unverified gossip
item by the likes of Drudge becomes a relevant part of a broader breaking
news story, and you feel as if you have to give your readers the Tribune's
take on the information. You have to characterize the information and tell
readers whether it has been checked out. In those limited instances, I
think we put information in the newspaper that we probably would ignore
had someone else not printed it. It is an attempt to place the information
in context, but it also makes me feel some loss of control as an editor."
POST-MONICA COVERAGE
Some of the best lines came in response to question of what to do about
a Monicagate story and whether editors of medium-size and smaller newspapers
feel they can control the story for their readers.
Edward Seaton, editor-in-chief of The Manhattan Mercury in Kansas, commented:
"We'll follow The Associated Press. On presidential campaign coverage we
are a rowboat tied to an aircraft carrier. We're not steering the ship."
In Rockford, Linda Grist Cunningham felt somewhat more control: "Heck,
yeah, I've got control of the wires: We don't run what we don't want."
"We have no control over a national story," said Craig Klugman in Fort
Wayne. "I mean, who cares how a local paper like ours plays the story,
aside from a few political junkies, who see an insidious motive for whatever
our display is. (You played the George Bush story less prominently than
the Clinton. You are closet Republicans. And speaking of closets, you're
probably gay, too.)"
"We are a small city daily, 26,000," said Elizabeth G. Cook of The
Salisbury (N.C.) Post. "When it comes to the who's-snorting-what stuff,
we rely on the wire services. What we control is the level to which we
play up the story. If a major story of that nature breaks, we are not going
to ignore it. We don't pretend to be above this stuff. But our primary
focus is local, so it may not get the play or attention that it would in
a major metro paper."
In Hartford, Brian Toolan responded: "I have a reflexive resistance
to questions such as this one. A principal ingredient of journalism is
judgment. ... I can say we weren't all that invigorated on the George W.
Bush cocaine thing. Rightly, we spent most of our energy wondering if it
would matter to anyone."
In Austin, Rich Oppel recalled his time in Charlotte, where he was editor
for many years. "The test for me is roughly one I applied back during the
Jim and Tammy Bakker period at Charlotte: Unless and until it affects the
stewardship of office, the private idiosyncrasies of public people aren't
news. My rule would be looser than that on a presidential candidate. If
we found out that one was snorting coke at the Mayflower after a hard day
of talking to the DAR, we'd put it in the paper. But a 'revelation' about
some minor infraction 20 years ago is hardly news. We might log it in as
an inside brief, thus signaling the level of importance. In the final analysis,
I can't tell you until I see the story."
Tim Morris in New Orleans said: "On the scandal watch, we'll evaluate
the stories as they happen. I think we were pretty balanced and responsible
with our coverage of Monica, et al, and expect things will be the same
this time. We'll look at the context of the bimbo-, cocaine-, draft-dodging
eruptions and decide how and how much coverage to give it. Like everyone
else, we'd prefer that this election be more focused on a real discussion
of issues, but we do live in the real world."
"We have no control over what the national press does; but we have complete
control over what we put in the paper," said Peter Bhatia at the Oregonian.
"Our standard for what can and should be printed went up during Monicagate.
Thus, they start higher this election and with much a greater bent to making
sure national stories are well-sourced and completely reported and don't
get into the paper without meeting that test."
"I'm afraid I don't agree with the notion that a lot of people seem
to have that the press committed a war crime in that case," said Tim McGuire
in Minneapolis. "In general, I thought newspaper coverage (ours included)
was accurate and responsible. I agree, there was a lot of coverage - but
the guy was impeached and faced removal from office. That story should
get a lot of coverage."
Kees is editor and program director of The Freedom Forum Pacific
Coast Center.
