Political reporters ignoring the voters
Jeff Jarvis is accusing political journalists for being lazy. They are, he argues, not even reporting properly, just repeating what anyone can look up on the Net.
Is political reporting really reporting when most of the material that's reported is available to all of us on the Internet?
We can hear what the candidate says in his stump speech.
We can read the candidate's stand on his web site.
We can analyze the same polls the reporters analyze (to make bad bets on the horse race).
So what are the reporters really giving us we can't get online?
They can hear the party line in the spin zone -- but that's not useful and it's not really reporting.
What is missing, and what would make the political reporters useful again, is the people an election campaign is supposed to be about in the first place, the voters. What do they mean and say?
The real story is the voters.
What do the voters think of the candidates? (Nobody reported that story on Howard Dean worth a damn, or they would have known he wasn't the front runner when they said he was.)
What are the issues that really matter to the voters? (As opposed to the issues the candidates and pundits think matter.)
How much does the campaign really matter in voters' lives? (A lot less than any politician or pundit thinks.)
That's the real reason to be out on the road: To hear what the voters have to say, to listen.
Not only the political reporters, but also the bloggers have been missing the real story, Jeff argues. Via Tim Blair.
I think it is very true that political journalists are not doing their jobs. In fact, that journalists are not doing their jobs is a persistent theme of this blog and quite a few others across the blogsphere. I am, however, not so certain that Dean's demise would have been caught with more attention to the voters. After all, the early opinion polls reflected real voters, it was just that they changed their minds once they learned to know the candidates better.
Would Dean be doing better today if Saddam was still hiding in his spider hole? I don't think so, but we'll never know for sure.
11:14:17 PM 
|
