Musings on Political Reporting

For any newspaper, reporting on politics is a tricky business. How does a news article (or series thereof) stay objective in an environment where every fact is spun? This is more than just equal time. As our politically-involved Editor-in-Chief Ben Weyl argues, equal time can be unfair when the facts clearly favor one position. But our own biases color what we see as facts. And Grinnell is a very liberal campus, where many people take for granted some facts that others dispute.

The S&B is not a partisan newspaper. Our editorial coverage will take positions, and if we do endorsements will probably endorse all Democrats. (As News Editor supervising our coverage of local political races, I'll abstain from editorial decisions and debates about political races to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.) Further, the issues that we choose to cover—issues like gender, sex, racial justice, poverty, and social action, to name a few—betray our implicit biases. A politically conservative reader looking through an S&B could with complete justification pick out ways in which we make value judgements based on what we cover and the tone we take in our stories. But we're a campus newspaper, and we'll cover campus issues, which tend to be liberal. We're not going to change to try to impose a false political balance on this campus. We do need to acknowledge where we're coming from, though.

My number one concern in editing political stories is to get past those implicit biases and deliver news in as objective a way as possible. I work with our writers, drawn from the same overwhelmingly liberal student body as I am, to parse sentence by sentence and eliminate statements that display bias.

An example:
In our first piece of political coverage this year, we did a breakdown of the positions of the two candidates for the Iowa House of Representatives in our district. Our writers sat down with Danny Carroll, the Republican incumbent, and Eric Palmer, his Democratic challenger, and got them to explain what they believed and what they'd do if voters sent them to Des Moines.

This particular election is a rematch from two years ago, when Carroll barely one. That election touched directly on Grinnell College, because of a mailing from the Iowa Republican Party in support of Carroll that attacked Grinnell students' voting in Iowa. The mailing also used images of Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) to describe the campus as "1000 East Coast liberals." In the aftermath of that mailing, Carroll apologized for the portrait of Grinnell's overwhelmingly midwestern student body but insisted that he wasn't involved in that mailing.

Now, that's the background. The question that I as an editor (and other editors I consulted about this) faced was, to what degree is this a relevant piece of information for an article about THIS election? We came to several conclusions:
• With the same two candidates running this year as last election, their previous matchup is important to provide context for the half of our student body who weren't around in 2004.
• As a campus newspaper, the mailing is still relevant because the issue of out-of-state students voting in their college town is still contentious. It's a way that the election directly touches the Grinnell student body.
• To touch on the mailing without context would be unfair to Carroll. By presenting it as a "Republicans vs. Grinnell College students" issue, the carefully laid out policy positions elsewhere in the article would be meaningless. It would make voting a personal matter for students who felt threatened as political actors by Carroll. (That's not to say that students should or shouldn't take the mailing personally. It's just not our job as newspaper to incite opinions either way.)
• Placement matters. We debated whether the mention of the mailing should go at the top of the article or at the bottom. On one hand, the mailing was a subsidiary issue to what we hoped to do in the article (explain policy positions), and should therefore be placed at the end of the article. On the other hand, it's bad writing to introduce the election, explain the candidates positions on the issues, and then say "Oh by the way" and bring in the election from 2004. Still, to put the mailing at the top of the article would privilige it over the here-and-now facts.

The decision we made was to run it at the top of the article, after the basic framing of the case and immediately before we launched into the issues. We expanded the one paragraph dealing with the article in the initial draft into two, placing it in a "horse race" context: yes, the Republicans are opposed to all these liberal college students voting in Grinnell, because it's a political threat to them. The Democrats, on the other hand, try very hard to encourage college students to vote in Grinnell because they see political advantage in it. Many students may still take that personally, but our presentation of it was in neutral terms as each party trying to maximize their share of the vote.

A long way to go
Obviously, our political reporting isn't very sophisticated yet. We make mistakes. I let phrases and quote selections slip through that favor the Democrats. And absolute objectivity is impossible. All we can do is constantly be aware of our biases and try to adapt to them.

It's a great thrill to be able to have the opportunity to cover political races as a college newspaper. Local politicians of both parties are very obliging in taking time out to sit down with reporters from a newspaper that covers around 2,500 readers who've likely already made up their minds as to which side they'll vote for. We understand that, and hope to simply inform those readers as best we can about issues that affect them as students and citizens.

Comments are welcome.