Editorial: What People Are Willing to Accept From the Media
Election season- or in current parlance, this entire calendar year- brings to the surface (for those who are paying attention, anyway) the context of relationships between a news organization and its readers, its advertisers and local politicians:
Readers, whether they realize it or not, gauge a news organization’s potential political affiliation/ spin based on multiple factors, including consistency in size and color of candidates’ photos (i.e., giving a full- page color spread to one politician, and a blurry black and white photo of another), length of respective interviews or amount of coverage related to one party.
Advertisers often bump up their presence in publications, fully aware of increased readership prior to elections, even if only temporary.
Politicians try to bring their best game to interviews for routine questions about past job performance, political belief structure and education background.
Election season also tells a news organization what these three groups of people expect from it, and also what they are willing to accept from it.
One example of this relationship revealed itself to us when a local candidate contacted our newsroom to protest our use of the phrase “no- show” when describing his absence from a recent candidate forum. His campaign manager insisted he was not a “no- show”; he was simply “not present”.
We denied his campaign’s request for a correction and apology because in the context of the English language, common sense and Merriam-Webster, “no- show” is defined as, “failure to show up”, which is indeed what occurred in that particular occasion. The phrase itself is indifferent.
Another example came during an interview with another candidate caught completely off guard when questioned about a potential conflict of interest caused by her marriage to the city clerk. When asked, the response was slow and suspicious, as though it were inappropriate to even have asked.
It’s an honest question that should be publicly addressed because, no matter what official safeguards are put into place; that appearance of impropriety is there for all to ponder. To not have addressed it would have been irresponsible, and would create unasnwered suspicions from readers.
That a veteran politician was so unprepared for even a quasi- vetting by media speaks volumes about the kind of news our community both expects and accepts.
Thus begets an enormous problem within the electorate; one that doesn’t always question what it is given to read, and one that might not always demand something better because constantly questioning a new source is not only endless, it’s pointless if a news reporter doesn’t actively work to present all the available facts on an ongoing basis.
Members of the media are the sole mechanism for objection in the face of nonsense, irresponsibility and unethical/ illegal activity within government. This is part of our job, above and beyond simply reporting the news to you. It requires an unshakable devotion to the truth of a story, which can only be discovered by presenting all the facts.
Brandi Makuski Managing Editor, Stevens Point City-Times