Objectivity and Balance and the 2012 Presidential Campaign
Joel Kaplan
September 27, 2011
Last week I spoke to about 100 senior citizens at a class held at the Syracuse OASIS.
The topic of my presentation was an examination of the role of the media in the coming 2012 presidential campaign. As part of my talk I asked the audience to think back to the 1980 election season. I believe there are many similarities between the two elections. In 1980, Jimmy Carter was facing serious economic challenges and his approval ratings had slowly descended; similar to what is currently happening to Barack Obama. And, as with this year, there were several Republicans running to be the Republican nominee. (We had some fun trying to list them all: besides Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, there was former Texas Gov. John Connelly; Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker; Robert Dole and the perpetual candidate, Harold Stassen among others).
But the one big difference between the 1980 and 2012 campaigns is the media coverage. Back in 1980, there was no cable news (CNN went on the air June 1, 1980, after the primary season). The result is that coverage was much less extensive—and less ideological.
Television coverage of the campaign in 1980 was limited to brief segments on the network evening news. The 24/7 coverage that has already permeated the 2012 campaign was non-existent. Nor was there gavel-to-gavel coverage of the several debates that we have seen so far this campaign season.
Some pundits are also saying that the Republican primary has, to some extent, turned into the Fox News primary, given the prominent influence the network plays among conservative voters.
But there was some clear frustration among those listening to me. “Where can we go to get fair and objective information about the candidates and their positions,” one asked. Another mentioned that despite the gobs of time spent on the cable news outlets about the campaign, most of it dealt with strategy or who was ahead and who was behind. The few times issues were mentioned, voices were raised and each side was calling the other a liar.
I mentioned a few newspapers and online news sites that I thought gave credible and consistent coverage. But I pointed out that because of the economic dislocation involving the newspaper industry, the amount of money, personnel and resources being spent on covering politics pales in comparison to previous election cycles.
(I recalled how I covered the Reagan campaign for The Tennessean back in 1980. Newspapers the size of The Tennessean—and even those much larger—no longer send their own reporters on the campaign trail).
When it comes to broadcast coverage, I thought back to a speech PBS newsman Jim Lehrer gave in June. Mr. Lehrer was speaking to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after receiving the CPB Lifetime Achievement Award.
“You know, I watch some of this stuff that now passes for news on cable television and elsewhere and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, you forgot to tell me what happened,” Mr. Lehrer said. “You just told me to what to think about it.”
Mr. Lehrer also said that it is now up to public broadcasting, with its commitment to objectivity and balance, to provide the type of news and information that many voters desire. “I believe with all my heart and soul that we not only have an opportunity, we have a responsibility in the public media to fill in the gaps of serious reporting that is falling by the wayside because of commercial problems that everyone has in the newspaper business, in the radio business, in the television business and in all of this together,” he said. “We have a mandate to and as I say a responsibility to step up to the plate and do it publicly—don’t play games. We are public broadcasting and we are there to practice public broadcasting kind of journalism.”
By mandate, Mr. Lehrer is undoubtedly referring to the 1967 public broadcasting charter that requires objectivity and balance in news coverage. As such, public broadcasting is the only journalism entity in the U.S. that by law is required to be objective and balanced. And this is what Jim Lehrer says this means:
“We are the serious people. We’re doing serious reporting, serious whatever and, and serious journalism. Let me, let make sure you understand what I’m, my definition of journalism is. It isn’t just, OK, who-what-when. I also believe there is a legitimate place for analytical journalism, and a legitimate place for opinion journalists. But I also believe that they are three very different functions. They must be performed by three different kinds and types of people, and when they perform those various acts, they must be clearly labeled.”
How does that differ from what one sees on cable news and increasingly on other news sources:
“First of all, we will tell you the facts. And then we will, we will give clean, clear carefully labeled analysis, and then will offer - we will not do it ourselves but we will facilitate an exchange of opinions about those facts”
Seems pretty simple. But unfortunately, at too many news organizations, the same people who are presenting the facts are also presenting their analysis and are also rendering their opinions. So it is not surprising that the viewer, listener and reader are confused. Journalists are mistaken for pundits and pundits are mistaken for journalists.
Under the Lehrer proposition, journalists should present the facts, pure and simple. If a journalist wants to engage in some analysis, then it should be labeled as such. And journalists should not be delivering opinions. They may invite pundits or political operatives on to their programs to opine, but the journalist should stay away from voicing his or her opinion.
This is not to say that the NewsHour or NPR or local public broadcasting news shows always gets things right. But that is where the various public-broadcasting ombudsmen come in. It is my job and the job of Edward Schumacher-Matos at NPR and Michael Getler at PBS to listen to complaints about unfair campaign coverage, investigate those complaints and to report our findings to the public.
The 2012 campaign is upon us.
And as Jim Lehrer says, “The only way we get an informed electorate is by having a serious professional journalism system, and that is where I believe we are needed more now than ever before.”
