Zack Roth of Campaign Desk proposes a solution to the shallowness he sees in the reporting from the current White House press corps -- hire more reporters!:
What we have in mind here is less a tracing of first causes and more a pragmatic here-and-now fix that would serve editors at major newspapers as well as their readers:
Create a small team of fast, thorough reporters whose primary task is to supplement your paper's helter-skelter daily political coverage by providing the crucial detective work and synthesis that's been lacking.
Two counterpoints from me: the details that Roth says news orgs aren't challenging, like President Bush's charge that Senator Kerry voted to raise taxes "over 350 times," are in fact being challenged, by such obscure media entities as the Associated Press. That The New York Times isn't running these stories doesn't mean they need to hire more reporters, just that they need to improve their coverage strategies.
Also, I'll agree with Roth that the he-said-she-said coverage is shallow and tedious, but I don't think more reporting's necessarily going to change that. Someone, somewhere considers it news every time our Presidential candidates say something, so we get stories like this ("Bush touts lower jobless rate in Midwest tour") and this ("Kerry says Rumsfeld must go").
Of course President Bush is touting a lower jobless rate. Of course Senator Kerry says Rumsfeld must go. We could have easily written these articles three months ago, leaving blanks for details to be filled in later:
President Bush, touring rural location TBD, is carrying a message of positive spin on news TBD he contends has been sparked by lower taxes.
Senator John Kerry called Thursday for outraged demand TBD and savaged the Bush administration over its handling of issue TBD, saying that, 'As president, hypothetical stated as fact TBD.'
With these quotes, the reporters did include a lot of useful information and context, but these articles are still fundamentally pegged on Just Another Stump Speech. Instead of hiring new reporters, why not free the current, presumably excellent reporters from having to write "stories" about this stuff, and give them a daily template to fill, with four parts, all bulleted:
- Candidate's Words: Here's what {fill in political figure} said today.
- Strategy Watch: Here's where this fits into {fill in political figure}'s campaign strategy.
- From the Peanut Gallery: Here's where Kathleen Hall Jamieson gets to comment.
- Context: Here's what they didn't tell you, and here's what you need to know to understand this better.
The reporters can just grab the necessary details and plug 'em in, which I'd hope would leave them some time to report deeper, more infrequent stories that actually pull these tidbits together into a coherent, compelling overview of the campaign.
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