Political Journalism and the '08 Races

This fall, I will be teaching a special topics journalism course titled "Campaign Coverage '08," which will focus on the presidential race of course, but also the myriad smaller races. (Click here for a flyer with more information about the course.) It's already been quite a fascinating race, on both the Republican and the Democratic sides -- John McCain's near-miraculous "comeback" from his moribund and all-but-over race for the Republican nomination, and especially the epic 15-round bout between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats.

In fact, one of the challenges of this course is that by the time the class actually starts in mid-August, so much will already have occurred. I hope that doesn't prove too much of a hurdle ... and I hope the students in the class are at least paying some attention to what's going on (and has been going on).

In the meantime, I am collecting articles and links that may be of interest. I saw today that this week, The New York Times' political editor is answering questions from readers, including naturally the grand-daddy of all questions: that of "bias" for or against a particular candidate. I thought his answer had some pretty good points:

In my view, all journalists bring their own subjective views and individual experiences along with them whenever they tackle a story. Sometimes that means ideological assumptions or political preferences. Sometimes it means personal judgments about a public figure, based on something as big as a politician's accomplishments or as small as whether he or she returns a reporter's phone calls.

Certainly in this election cycle we've had to be on high alert: that Senator John McCain's willingness to chat up the press, for example, did not lead anyone to fall into the tank for him; that the sheer excitement and energy surrounding Mr. Obama did not become seductive; and that our editorial page's decision to endorse Mrs. Clinton in the Democratic primary did not lead to a perception that the news pages were following suit. The addition of race and gender to the political equation in a big way forced us to be that much more sensitive to real or perceived biases.

There are all kinds of internal and external checks on bias and personal preference. Editors like me have the primary responsibility to identify bias, and we take that job seriously. And while I would not dispute the longstanding assertions that there are more political liberals in newsrooms than conservatives, our political staff, as best
I can tell, represents all kinds of backgrounds and beliefs, and because we all work so closely and in such a fishbowl, we all tend to keep one another on the straight and narrow.

Of course, you can take even fairness too far. We're not interested in balancing our coverage by putting our fingers on the scale, so that we artificially maintain an equivalent number of, say, positive Obama and Clinton stories. And we don't want to judge every political pronouncement or policy proposal equally worthy — sometimes they demonstrably are not and should be called out for what they are.