In recent years, it feels like the quantity of political reporting in daily newspapers has dropped off. Whether a function of smaller newsrooms, editors who believe the public wants less political coverage, editors who are gun shy about provocative political topics, or something else, there just seems to be less political coverage.
Political reporters do still cover the most predictable, scripted and formal of political events — candidacy filings and announcements, campaign finance filings, party endorsement events, and running mate announcements. For the most part, the public snores through all of this formulaic coverage of predictable events.
Case in point: Today’s Star Tribune carried a fairly in-depth article about Hennepin County Commissioner and gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson picking Guy I’ve Never Heard Of as his Lieutenant Governor running mate. In this article, we are earnestly briefed about the selection of someone who almost certainly won’t impact the outcome of the gubernatorial race, and almost certainly wouldn’t have substantive duties if he somehow beat the odds and actually got the job.
What is even better is that we can look forward to this kind of scintillating “candidate chooses running mate” coverage for each of the multitudes of candidates in the gubernatorial race. Spoiler alert: Each candidate will be picking someone brilliant who is “balancing their ticket” in some fashion.
Meanwhile, more important and interesting things go uncovered or undercovered.
- When congressional candidate and big box store heir Stuart Mills III airs a TV ad portraying himself a self-made man who treats his workers well, there is no newspaper probing of those two claims.
- When Senator Al Franken films an ad implying he has been working overtime to help small businesses get high skilled workers, there is no probing of the veracity of that claim.
- When shadowy independent expenditure groups’ attack ads are aired, there is too little work put into trying to learn about the financial backing for the ads, and whether the groups’ claims are based in fact.
- When Candidate A criticizes Policy X while refusing to offer a detailed alternative, there is too little exposing that act of political cowardice and intellectual dishonesty.
These are shadowy areas where savvy, sleuthing political reporters could actually shed light. But when political operatives figure out that lying and hiding won’t get exposed, guess what, lying and hiding proliferates. When that happens, our democracy gets weaker.
I hope this isn’t an either/or issue. Maybe there still is enough capacity in newsrooms and column inches in newspapers to cover both the formulaic stories and the more probing stories. That would be ideal. But if there no longer is enough journalistic capacity for both types of coverage, our democracy needs the latter much more than it needs the former.
– Loveland
