Fall 1996
“Negative Campaigns: What Can Journalists Do?”
By Jon Margolis
Political Correspondent Emeritus
Chicago Tribune
The very first speaker, not counting the hosts who welcomed us all, disputed the very premise under which we all gathered. A day and a half later, the very last speaker concurred with the first. Sounds like a bummer of a meeting, no?
No. Even with some of us (I was that first speaker, summoned from my chair at dinner to explain why I had come; Paul Taylor was the last) contending that “negative campaigning” was not the worst thing in the world, the weekend retreat entitled “Negative Campaigns: What can journalists do?” was a valuable pause for thought.
You get a bunch of folks who are good at what they do, but who think that it can be done better, put them together for 36 or so hours of meeting, eating, drinking and schmoozing, and they will learn from one another. The schmoozing always turns out to be as important as the official proceedings.
And if there is anything that political reporters know — especially good political reporters — it’s that political journalism can be done better. With the possible exception of education, there is probably not an endeavor in all the land that is as analyzed, criticized and dissected as political reporting. And even though some of this criticism annoyingly comes from professors writing in quarterlies (quarterlies! If we had three months to do a story, we’d never make mistakes, either) a good bit of it comes from its own practitioners, who know that try as we might, we never get it quite right.
Maybe that’s what makes it such fun.
As ever, there is nothing close to unanimity about how we ought to get it quite right. Because one sponsor of the retreat was the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and because the folks at the Center had invited several practitioners of that calling, the debate about civic journalism was latent throughout the meeting, even though it was never overtly joined.
Which was fine. As Stan Cloud of the Citizens Election Project said, when civic journalism leads to good journalism, it’s a good idea. And sometimes it does. By whatever name you call it, the stuff that Tara Murphy is doing at WBUR-FM in Boston — finding out what voters are really interested in — is just good old information gathering.
Besides, as a representative of the crotchety old-timer school, I think I have to admit that our faction should re-examine our myths. At one point, David Blomquist, the Public Affairs Editor at The Record in New Jersey, asked what newspapers could or should do that would increase voter turnout. Cloud and I both replied that increasing voter turnout wasn’t our job. Telling folks what happened and what it meant was our job.
Well, yes, but let’s be honest. To be a political reporter is to be a skeptic, a curmudgeon, maybe even a grouch. But it is to be a skeptic, curmudgeon, grouch who believes in American democracy. Otherwise, why do the job?
OK, to eat well on somebody else’s money. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?
If you don’t think that a well-informed electorate making rational decisions is good in and of itself, you really ought to go find honest work. And while you can make the argument that sometimes we’d all be better off if fewer people voted, you can’t make it very easily. Or very successfully.
No, this doesn’t mean you cover up the truth just because it might tend to depress turnout. It does mean that we can never totally separate the process from the content. And it means that maybe it’s not a bad idea for news organizations to do things that inspire, rather than repel, civic consciousness among their customers.
Maybe that’s why I was impressed with the presentation by Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation. She’s not a journalist, but she’s doing things out there that journalists ought to know about and applaud.
The Foundation is using the latest computer technology to inform voters about politics. It is designing sites on the World Wide Web so that people can sit at their computers and read position papers, get the candidates schedules, and find out who is giving how much money to whom. Because San Francisco already has electronic filing of campaign contributions, the Voter Foundation was able to put it all on line three days after it was filed. It has created a new Web site called Digital Sunlight, which has links to all the campaign finance data available on the web.
That’s not much yet. But it will be more. Alexander said 12 states are in the process of getting to electronic filing. Does anybody doubt that the other 38 will follow?
All this information is designed for the voter. But it takes no great subtlety of mind to see how valuable it can be for political reporters. I remain firm in my belief that writing about campaign finance is boring. Going to bowling alleys with candidates is what’s fun. Still, the money is important, and what Alexander is doing is making important information available, faster than ever.
That’s a reporter’s dream. It means we can do a better job of informing the people. Which is our job. Not just informing, but informing people.
Not a bad notion to take away from 36 hours of speeches, meals, and shmoozes.
