Covering the campaign
A letter to the editor today takes us to task for not reporting on then gubernatorial candidate Bev Perdue's campaign speech at the Depot.
Your newspaper did a very bad job covering her campaign.
Early on, there was an important rally at the Depot, only about 200 yards from the News & Record building; no reporter covered it, and I do not recall any reference to it in your paper. No reporter came to the celebration in Raleigh when she won the primary. (I was at both events.) Most coverage of her campaign used AP stories.
It's not unusual for supporters of political candidates to tell us that we haven't done their candidates justice.
But it is true we didn't cover that rally. It wasn't personal or political. It was in keeping with a decision we made early on that, outside of the presidential race, we weren't going to do much with campaign rallies. Candidates use those occasions to give stump speeches; little news occurs. Reporters can spend their time better. We also didn't cover many of the local candidate forums for the same reason.
For the big state races, we did use AP stories often. That's one of the reasons we buy the wire service.
Comments (4)
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On local forums, I got to two of them for the commissioners, but the candidates didn't go into much that we didn't cover already in previews and other stories.
Posted on November 12, 2008 4:44 PM
Another sad story. The Governor has a lot to say about education, taxes, roads, etc. What the Governor does or does not do is for most people more important than what the President does. It is interesting how the N&R goes local for front page stories but not local for political stories. This type of thinking is very harmful to the paper. Pray for them.
Posted on November 12, 2008 5:14 PM
I agree, Joe. We just didn't think that we would get at all those important positions by covering her stump speech when she came to town.
Posted on November 12, 2008 5:34 PM
Good point. If the candidates are not giving answers to the issues we face, then this fact should be brought to the attention of readers and the candidate. The reason candidates give stump speaches with few specifics is they think that is what we want and we will not know the difference. Anything you can do to increase the level of discussion is appreciated. I am not sure that ignoring the event does that. I may be wrong.
Posted on November 13, 2008 8:17 AM