A Challenge to Political Journalists: Get Over The 'Horse Race'

The following piece was produced by the Huffington Post's OffTheBus

An Open Letter to Paid Political Reporters On The 2008 elections:

A few weeks ago, the Shorenstein center reported initial findings about coverage of the 2008 campaign. They were very disappointing.

Just 1% of your stories to date examined what citizens most want and need to know: the candidates' records or past public performance. The study found 63% of your stories were horse race stories. In the month of waterboarding, the water bill, and the droughts around the world, I add another lament to the flood: water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. We are adrift in polls and strategies, and are parched out here for the news we need about the men and women who would be our President.

To a degree which you may find daunting, your reporting matters, both individually and collectively. One or two of you striking out a new path in political reporting elevates the entire process. Together, you bear enormous responsibility for the shape, nature, and tenor of our collective discussion about our next President.

Here are some hopes I have about how you will spend the next two months, perhaps the months in your own lives when you have the greatest influence that you will ever have on American democracy.

A. DO write comparative, contemporary pieces about the candidates' past on contemporary issues

Yesterday I went to Lexis and searched for the name of one of the candidates for President ("Hillary Clinton") within the same article as two of the big issues this week that she would deal with if she were President ("farm bill", "Pakistan"). I searched the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, seeking stories from the prior week. None of these three papers included information about her response to the Farm Bill or Pakistan, her thoughts on the Farm Bill or Pakistan, her history with the Farm Bill or Pakistan, or a comparison to other candidates. This is a major failure of communication. When a major bill hits the senate, you should immediately respond with a story on the candidates and the bill; how they've voted in the past, connections to funders, what they have said. When Iran is in the news, do the same. I tried to "cover" these comparisons as a citizen and learned that this is really hard work; I'm a professor with lots of unstructured time, and I still can't do it. It takes too much time, and takes deep knowledge of the candidates' comparative histories, and it takes working fast. We need you to do this for us. This kind of reporting--where the political meets the Political--does a few things. First, it places candidates in the appropriate context by forcing a series of ongoing decisions on issues that are not necessarily of their choosing. It takes them out of an inappropriate context for decision making--singular campaign issues created by them. It enables readers to learn, and it connects the reality based community to the community of illusions. 30 minutes can find what Clinton said today about Pakistan, but it is much harder to find and verify past involvement, connections to donors, connections to key players, and compare them across candidates.

In fact, whenever possible, compare candidate's stated positions to each other. You do a pretty good job of this, but be more comprehensive. As voters, we have to make a choice between options, not between positions and absolutes, and we want to know what the options are. Also, it creates tension around issues, instead of around non-issues. Take advantage of and build up policy differences for good drama.

B. DO use your own Images

Images are good--this is material not accessible to us at home--good quality images of the setup, the press around the candidate, other reporters. BUT do not use any images that are set up by the campaign. If you have to, include in the accompanying report the way in which that image was forced, i.e., "Romney's campaign bussed x farmers in to sit in the front row." Failing to report this circumstance is no more useful to the reader than actually using images created by the campaign and given to reporters as stock footage. Also, feel free to use images not of the candidates or supporters. For example, when reporting on the candidates various attitudes towards the farm bill, feel free to use images of lobbyists, industrial farms, etc; they will attempt to have all their farm bill images relate to small farmers, but you have the liberty to take pictures of the impacts of their policy decisions.

C. Polls & Strategy

Poll results should never be a story in and of themselves. Ever. Your friends on the bus, your friends at the bar, they like talking about polls, but we are bored with them. "Thompson jumps 5 points" is not a story. It is an addition to a story. It belongs at the end of the inverted pyramid. It is especially not a story because all the comments you will get on this "development" are from insiders who want to shape the news more than they want to understand it. They will not actually improve the story. Polls are easily available online for the junkies, and for non-junkies, you have a special responsibility to treat us as citizens, and assume we are more interested in the candidates. The next great political reporters of this generation will not be those who spend much time on polls; writing about polls will warp your thinking and your capacity to experience politics. As for strategy, mention it, but not as the story, except once a month or so. I can handle two more major strategy pieces--any more than that is a failure of imagination. Polls & strategy are crack; you know that. But be a little disciplined. You disserve us if you aren't, you disserve the country, and you probably get less readership.

D. Re-introduce the Biographies

You've done great work developing the biographies of these candidates over the past several months. I've loved that work. But don't let it get lost in the archive. Re-introduce that work now, as more people start to pay attention. Try to remember what really interested you as you started following your candidate, and introduce that again to us; the stuff your editor thought was irrelevant in July, or that you printed in July, but in a tiny footnote in an article no one read.

E. Please, do not

Do not write an article about what insiders say. Do not analyze the debate only in terms of the "top candidates". Do not call insiders for comment after the debate. Insiders are not experts. Unless you have some good reason to think they know what they are talking about--a surprising track record of predictions--their predictions are not worth anything; if there is some reason you actually think they can predict, then include that reason. Being a paid strategist should automatically disqualify someone from any prediction. Do not mention "the big boys" in any context. It's a really grating phrase, and has the tendency of making the writer sound like a man with a very big napoleon complex. Do not judge a candidates' likelihood of success based on the fundraising. You add no information in so doing; all you do is make it more likely that money will influence the election. (Increasingly, the point of raising money is to get earned media; some campaigns treat you like prostitutes, assured that you will dutifully report that raising money makes them viable, depending more upon your so reporting than on the ads themselves.) Do not use any staffers for commenting on the other campaigns choices. You wouldn't do that if you were reporting on companies, but more than that, it disconnects you from your readers, as you start to report about (and then, inevitably, for) a very insular and weird culture, the political campaign culture. If the staffers think your reporting is off, it's a good sign you are in the right direction; if they think you have it all right, it's a good sign you are doing something horribly wrong. I was a staffer. I like staffers. But their interests, vocabulary, and set of measurements are not the interests, vocabulary, and set of measurements of your readers or the country. Do not use anonymous sources, even if the anonymous sources are masquerading as "key democrats" or "strategists working for Clinton." This is not Watergate, this isn't even Food Lion. We want to know who you are depending upon.

Conclusion

We rely on you deeply--perhaps more than you are comfortable with. You are, for the next few months, the linchpin of the democracy. We rely on you to resist the candidates creating the coverage; most of the leading candidates, in different ways, share an interest in diffusing the debate about current issues and keeping the conversation on grand plans (unveiled on their own sweet time) and strategies and polls. Most of the citizens want to know how candidates will react to the world as it unfolds, on its own bitter, difficult schedule. The good news is that citizens like stories that bring the political and the Political together. If you write about the candidates on Pakistan when Pakistan is in the news, your readership will grow; if you write about the candidates past relationships with Federal Contractors when Blackwater is in the news, your readership will grow. If you write about polls and strategy, you'll get lots of feedback, but from the wrong community: political consultants and strategists. The rest of us are bored silly by polls & strategy stories. We may read them, but they do not grab us.

I believe political reporting is hard. So I offer this letter to you in sympathy, as an effort to encourage political reporting that will add much more richness to 2008 than we've had in the past. As a paid reporter covering 2008 candidates, you are in a uniquely powerful position. The internet allows you to take an extraordinarily deep array of data--especially including past performance--and bring it together in a compelling set of stories that will help us make good decisions about the future of our country.