STUMP: media and politics

Righteous Anger or Self-Righteous Snub?

The AP reports:

Gov. Jeb Bush's office did not invite The Palm Beach Post to the governor's traditional end-of-the-year interviews with reporters, citing what they said was unprofessional behavior.

The Post suggests this move is in retaliation for a series of articles critical of Bush's school vouchers program. Bush's office says Post employees, especially the paper's Tallahassee bureau chief, have behaved unprofessionally towards government staff members. The AP article stays impressively neutral in the scuffle.

The Post plans to send a reporter to the interviews anyway. (Via Romenesko.)

Capturing the Reagans

What should we consider when mixing politics and entertainment in our coverage? This Columbia Journalism Review piece about "The Reagans," CBS' docudrama that got shunted off to Showtime, gives some thoughtful insights into just that question.

The Blogging of the President

At his new site The Blogging of the President: 2004, Chris Lydon writes:

Once upon a time the reporters who covered the presidential candidates were dubbed “the boys on the bus,” and in my first campaign assignment with The New York Times in 1972 I was one of them. In the campaign of 2004 I feel more like a Martian in a baseball dugout. [...]

I'd like you to join me please in a new conversation around the presidential campaign. It feels like time to relearn a game in which all the rules have changed. We are looking everyday at a digital transformation of the constitutional ritual in which the American people choose their chieftain. So the invitation to all comers is to keep talking and posting till we get this story straight. Give me your comments, your essays, your emails, and together we will figure this out.

Risks in Straying from the Political Script

We've written before about stenography journalism, when journalists simply report what politicians have to say, making no effort to root out what's true, false, or misleading in their words.

I applaud this AP article by Nedra Pickler for making that effort. But, I wonder, does it cloud the truth up even more in the process?

The Campaign That Wasn't There

Howard Dean's campaign signals a new type of politics, a revolution, says Jay Rosen, that has left journalists out:

A control revolution, which took almost 50 years to play out, had by 2000 completed most of its work. Both campaigns were able to restrict the candidate to message-speak. At times, the two nominees sounded like tracking polls with vocal chords. Bush and Gore made themselves pitifully small for us—button pushers for the tiny portion of uncommitted voters the pros had identified as everything. But 95 percent of the country lay outside this everything. And somehow that fact too had gotten away from them.

“Well, of course!” said the professionals in journalism. "This is how the game is played. Citizens of the United States, let us to explain winning to you." But this too was a game—inside baseball—that had gotten away from the players. It was easy for journalists to think of themselves as outsiders, (observers) but then chatter away as insiders (participants), and never face the fullness of this contradiction.

But journalists have a chance to get back on the grassroots gravy train, Rosen says:

In Search of Transparency...

With links to the introductory column by Dan Okrent, new public editor of The New York Times, Jeff Jarvis praises Okrent's self-portrait of his likes, dislikes, and, among other things, party affiliation. And Jarvis asks: Shouldn't all reporters be doing something like this?

What do you think? What are the pros and cons of reporters -- especially reporters who cover politics -- providing a similar self-snapshot?

Attitude and the Election Night Headline

Philadelphia Daily News Managing Editor Ellen Foley, who says readers appreciate attitude in their news, tells the story behind the headline reporting the outcome of the recent city mayoral election. The Associated Press Managing Editors site also updates coverage of the mayoral contest in Knoxville, where the News-Sentinel was criticized for getting too close to various campaigns. News-Sentinel Editor Jack McElroy offers some lessons learned. You'll find it all at APME.com.

The Feedback Loop

Over at PressThink, Jay Rosen writes about the President's Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad. I think his characterization is really interesting: He calls such events "co-equal with the publicity they generate" and says they "could not exist without that publicity."

That blows my mind. We're talking about political events which the press attends because they're important... but which are only important because the press attends them.

More on the 'Net as Resource

A new study from BURST! Media, which sells advertising across a network of sites, released a new study of 12,000 Web users about how they will use the Web to research campaign information. Here's what they said:

Among definite voters, the Internet will play a much larger role as a resource for gathering information about candidates and the key issues they will cover than during the last election. Seventy percent of young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 plan to use the Internet for information on the upcoming election. The percentage is close to 60 percent in other definite voter age segments.

Older voters are also increasingly turning to the Internet for campaign information. Sixty-one percent of senior citizen voters plan to use the Internet for gathering info, which is 23.5 percent more than during the mid-term elections in 2002. Fifteen and twenty percent increases are also expected in the 45-54 and 55-64 age groups, respectively.

Thanks to MediaPost for the news item. We've requested the full study. If they send it, look for more details here and on Poynter Online's Convergence Chaser

The Medicare Debate

The word "Medicare" these days = my eyes glazing over.

I have searched far and wide for a story or a package that lays out the issue and the recent developments in easy-to-understand terms, provides the necessary context, gives me a background on the debate, and analyzes the political ramifications.

I'm still looking for that story.

But if you have any interest in writing it, one of Poynter Online's columnists, Sree Sreenivasan, just pointed out a good place to start — the Kaiser Family Foundation's Medicare site.