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.)

Editor's Account of Arnold Story

Los Angeles Times | The New York Times

In a Sunday column, L.A. Times Editor John S. Carroll chronicles the paper's handling of its investigation of sexual misconduct charges against Arnold Schwarzenegger, addressing the various rumors that have surfaced on talk radio and elsewhere.

In a Monday article posted online Sunday evening, Jim Rutenberg of the The New York Times notes that new media outlets such as cable and the Web are providing candidates with a variety of ways of bypassing what they regard as unfair coverage by mainstream media. He also reports that a growing percentage of voters believes the media impedes public officials' ability to do their jobs:

"Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which regularly polls people on attitudes toward the news media, said that in 1985, 17 percent of people said the news media got in the way of leaders trying to do their jobs, and nearly two-thirds said that critical coverage kept leaders from misbehaving. By last year, a third said critical news coverage got in the way."

Who Says He Did What?

The L.A. Times publishes its investigation of Arnold Schwarzenegger's behavior with women in a 3,600-word piece played on Page One today. Schwarzenegger responded to the story with an apology for behaving "badly."

The investigation included allegations from six women, four of them un-named, and raises the kind of questions about anonymous sources that crop up in coverage of most campaigns. What considerations should guide the use of such sources in these kinds of situations?

The San Jose Mercury News followed up on The Times story with an online survey. Such surveys are notoriously unreliable as indices of public opinion, partly because of their self-selective nature. The Mercury News appears to guard against ballot stuffing by blocking repeat votes, but it raises the question: Should news organizations use unreliable survey tools to gauge public opinion on matters of significant interest?

Categories for this Weblog

We've listed what we're working with so far after this post, and welcome your suggestions for more.