Friday, February 5, 2010
Media / News Bites Blown Coverage
Posted by Michael Miner on Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 2:14 PM
John Kass sounded seriously apologetic on the radio Friday over the terrible job the media did in vetting Scott Lee Cohen, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor with the flamboyant history.
“Our job as reporters is to find stuff out, is to vet and scrub every candidate, and that wasn’t done in this case,” Kass told WGN’s Greg Jarrett.
There was a delicious story to be written — steroids, hookers, assault charges all figured in Cohen's murky pawnbroking history — and no one had written it, except the Sun-Times's Mark Brown, months ago, and Brown admits he didn't do it justice.
So Kass was sorry as any reporter is sorry who let a good one get away. But his regrets went beyond that. He sounded embarrassed for his business. "All of us should have done a better job. We didn't," he said. "I can't explain it....I'm sorry. I won't let it happen again."
Cohen hadn't even hidden his past. When he filed for lieutenant governor last March he'd told Brown about his checkered past. And Brown thought, who cares? He writes, "How was I to know way back then that the Democratic voters of Illinois would be so dumb as to elect him, brainwashed by millions of dollars in advertising about his job fairs? That's why I told Cohen at the time that nobody even knew who he was, let alone cared enough to want to read about his dirty laundry, and I didn't see the need to go into it."
The only false note Kass struck — and it wasn't so much false as naive — came when he told Jarrett that it wouldn't happen again. "The next guy who runs for mosquito abatement district in some suburb — who got pinched shoplifting — you know vampire fangs for his Halloween costume when he was ten years old — that’s what happened to me when I was ten — I guarantee you that'll be out there.”
But when it happened this time it was happening again. In 1986 Mark Fairchild, a LaRouchie, won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, and the only way the gubernatorial candidate, Adlai Stevenson III, could disentangle himself was to to create a third party and run as its nominee. As the Solidarity Party candidate,Stevenson lost to incumbent governor Jim Thompson by about 400,000 votes. Four years earlier, as the Democratic candidate, he'd lost to Thompson by about 5,000 votes. Now Stevenson's advising Quinn to think about his own third-party run, which would have the advantage of being virtuous and disadvantage of being almost sure to fail.
In the Democratic primary, Fairchild had defeated a state senator favored by Stevenson; Cohen defeated a state representative, Art Turner. If you're running for lieutenant governor, it apparently helps to be totally unknown. Next thing you know we'll have stealth candidates financed by the opposition running for lieutenant governor in order to sabotage the ticket. I suppose we don't have that yet.
Nothing shows the need for professional media more clearly than professional media themselves when they don't produce. In a better world we'd have read about polling that showed Scott Lee Cohen coming on strong, and on the Republican side gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady coming on strong. (But is there some poetic justice in Pat Quinn, for all the trouble Cohen poses, at least getting to run against a guy who has no problem with creationism being taught in the public schools?)
This was a terrible election. It was too soon, the candidates were too many and too mediocre, and to judge from the turnout, as well as some of the nominees, the public was neither engaged nor informed. (Studying a ballot in November is going to be like rooting around in the bins of a second-hand store for a used T-shirt worth buying at the price.) The press might have been better than the candidates, but it wasn't.
Comments (13)
Showing 1-13 of 13
I thought the emphasis for the fabulously redesigned, lean, mean, newly aggressive papers here was "local, local, local." Maybe Springfield isn't local enough. Or maybe, for the Trib, Cohen's background didn't focus-group well with frenzied families and carefree couples.
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They couldn't focus on the other candidates because all of the Trib's ammo was targeted on Stroger.
Springfield may not be local enough, but since 80 percent of the Illinois electorate is supposedly living north of I-80, how far would the media have had to travel to discover Brady's strength?
The “Fourth Estate” is asleep at the wheel in Chicago - as usual.
Why can’t we get more than tasty flash and glitter from the Chicago news media? Right now everyone is busy blaming everyone else for the emergence of scandal-plagued Scott Lee Cohen as the Democratic Party’s Illinois lieutenant governor nominee.
Yes, there was lots of blame to go around because nobody did much to stop a millionaire from taking the prize. Thankfully he has now dropped out. But somebody should have been paying attention to this train wreck of a candidate, right? But who?
I point to the news media, our historic fourth estate guardians of the court of public opinion. Chicago Sun-Times, political columnist Lynn Sweet tried to dump a bucket of blame on a single politician. in contrast to John Kass, she gave a tiny nod to news media culpability, but then quickly excused her industry, saying Chicago’s news media is “stretched-thin.”
Oh, our poor news media industry. It may be easy for Ms. Sweet to cite publishing’s economic troubles to explain why Cohen’s arrest record was ignored. But how does this sound to you? The economic crisis prevented Chicago’s publishers, editors, and writers from carrying out their fundamental responsibility to be public watchdogs on our behalf and inform us better. Yup, let’s blame the economy.
I think not. The instinct to give us “news you can use” began evaporating to a mere afterthought long ago. It doesn’t take a college degree to understand the new priorities: dumbed down drivel. These days the media is busy crafting ingenious ways to fill newspapers, magazines, radio/tv air waves, and the Internet with, for lack of a better term, frivolous entertainment.
I think not. Things were quite different years ago when I was a reporter and an assistant city editor for the famed but now dearly departed City News Bureau of Chicago. With today’s mainstream media landscape, it’s easy to see that the instinct to cover “news you can use” has evaporated to a mere afterthought. It doesn’t take a journalism degree to understand the new priorities: dumbed down drivel. These days the media is busy crafting ingenious ways to fill newspapers, magazines, radio/tv air waves, and the Internet with, for lack of a better term, frivolous entertainment.
Serious attention to news and information has been replaced by a manic focus on all sorts of nonsense. We are fed huge portions of diversion that are of no real consequence to our lives on this planet, everything from celebrity gossip to nightlife and sports features. How are voters in an election season to be informed when the media footprint for sensational flash and fluff is so huge and takes center stage?
Of course, there has been some good and valuable reportage on substantive affairs in our city, but it’s spotty and becoming harder to find without an exhausting Google search. In elections, our news media’s weak efforts are largely about the horserace element. Not enough about the who, what, where, or when . . . and little on why we should care who gets elected.
I’m not letting the news media off the hook for such negligence. I’m also not buying into the notion that they are only responding to the public’s supposed hunger for fluff news. Who told them we want more and flashier scoops on sex and Tiger Woods? I sent no letter asking for updates on pop star Michael Jackson, who these days is making more “news” as a dead man than he did when he was alive.
So, please, don’t tell us that our news media has a hard time researching, investigating, and reporting real news because it is “stretched thin.” Just report the truth. You stretched it thin. You invest the bulk of your resources in fluff. As for investing in strong journalism about real issues? Not so much.
Peace, Michael J. Harrington
What Michael J. Harrington said.
And I think the roots of this sad and spotty performance can be traced to the Zell Tribune's clear concern about establishing a marketable image for itself rather than letting actual news or journalistic judgment guide its coverage.
They've even been fairly open about this, with their campaign to win over "carefree couples" and "frenzied families" in the outer 'burbs. But this is marketing, which only incidentally and occasionally includes good journalism. As such, the Tribune is no longer a serious newspaper but a kind of freak hybrid.
This transformation hasn't been necessary. There are newspapers all over the Midwest that, though reduced in size and scope, still make a credible effort. The Tribune remainsl a potentially capable outfit, with more than 400 journalists on staff. Sadly, though, neither those journos nor the hundreds pitched overboard by the crappy hired help have seen fit to take a stand against the categorically cockeyed prioritization of marketing over news.
At least one of the idiots behind the Sun-times twitter feed isn't apologetic.
http://twitter.com/Suntimes/status/8690954…
@FGFM The arrest was widely reported - and copped to by Cohen. The details have been sealed until the last couple of days.
At some point I'd like to hear what Pelham has against "frenzied families" and "carefree couples" (or the use of marketing to target them, or whatever his complaint is). He has used those phrases on this blog probably around a dozen times and I've never been able to figure out exactly what his complaint is.
Certainly, the inability of the media to report on Cohan's past has nothing to do with "frenzied families" and "carefree couples". It resulted from their unwillingness to understand that the lieutenant governor's race was not a meaningless contest that wasn't worth paying attention to. It is the same reason the voters were unable to make a responsible decision. Most people who voted in the race clearly had no idea who they were voting for. I hope nobody who is critisising the media for failing to alert them about Cohen's past voted for anyone in the race without making at least at slight effort to know who they are. If you don't have time to do that then don't vote in the race. The lieutenant governor is one heartbeat or resignation away from being the governor. People do die and they do sometimes decide, for whatever reason, to leave office. So hopefully both the media and all of the voters who didn't take this race seriously have learned a lesson.
Along with Kass, I'd like to thank Greg Hinz of Crain's for taking some responsibility for the lack of reporting on Cohen's background before the election.
And here's some more fine work from the Tribune.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/electio…
Republican candidate taps family fortune, social netowrking [sic] for win
---
The Sun-Times is even worse with the typos, at least on the web.
@ The original IAC:
There's nothing wrong with marketing if you have an established product and are trying to highlight its better qualities to get people to buy. There may even be nothing wrong with marketing if you use it to put together a product from the ground up that will appeal to the public.
But there is something wrong with marketing if you use it to knowingly put out a product that's less than optimal by pandering to uninformed or inexpert public opinion. Think about it: What if doctors did that?
In the case of newspapers, the basic idea is that you have editors and reporters spending all their working hours figuring out what the public needs to know and then trying to deliver. If, instead, you sort of slip in some focus-group driven stuff, steering your reporters and editors away from what they should, in their judgment, be doing or crowding out what they have done, you're selling a different product. It may be good, bad or indifferent. But it's not what newspapers have been--or supposedly have been, at least since journalism became a profession rather than a trade.
It may sound arrogant (in fact, it kind of is), but journalists--just because they have the mandate and luxury to think deeply and at length about what the public really ought to know--are in a better place to make such judgments than "frenzied families" and "carefree couples," who probably have a lot of other things are their minds.
That said, there is room for lots of products that cater to public whim, and there's not a darned thing wrong with that. This is part of what the wide open space of the Internet is for.
"In the case of newspapers, the basic idea is that you have editors and reporters spending all their working hours figuring out what the public needs to know and then trying to deliver."
And how can these journalists figure out what the public needs to know without talking to them (or without talking to all but those who are in their own social circle)? That really is kind of an elitist attitude. I don't think anybody believes that every news article should be the result of a focus group or that journalists should always tailor every bit of their content to scientific studies of what the public supposidely wants. But I don't understand why anyone would find it bad to go out and talk to people to see if there are stories that people are interested in that are not being covered. And I don't see what is wrong with asking readers whether they might get more out of subjects being covered in a differant manner. What is wrong with asking people how you could improve your product? It would certainly be ludicrous to suggest that journalists always do their job well and cannot improve.
It is an elitist attitude. But it's earned and transparent elitism (as opposed to the hidden elitism that drives our economy and politics, but that's another subject). The only point I'm trying to make is that most non-journalists don't have the time or energy, and shouldn't be expected, to be well-informed enough to know what they should know without any aid from the media, mainly newspapers. And if you're trying to market a publication that's supposed to be the product of journalists but instead is some kind of hedged hybrid designed to appeal to that uninformed or uninterested audience, it is compromised, and probably not in a good way.
You should check out the big debate over the "public journalism" concept that was being shopped around a few years back. It had its strengths and weaknesses. The Tribune's marketing emphasis, I think, is kind of a dumbed-down version.
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