By Raul Ramirez, News and Public Affairs Director, KQED, San Francisco
One of the most stimulating and inspiring journalists and teachers I've known, H. G. "Buddy" Davis, for years closed his reporting classes at the University of Florida with the admonition: "Keep your head up, your lens clean - and don't take any wooden nickels."
In the span of a career that has taken me to four metro newspaper newsrooms and, more recently, to the world of public broadcasting, Buddy Davis' folksy admonition has served as a good moral compass: Be alert. Keep a clear vision. Examine rhetorical currency.
It came to mind the other day as I considered the importance of diversity to political coverage.
When journalists discuss diversity, we tend to cite a handful of core reasons why it is important to our mission:
That's what we say.
But even today, the tendency in our political coverage is to spotlight the leading major party candidates with an occasional throwaway reference to others. The platforms of the lesser-known, who lack the resources of a Ross Perot or a Michael Huffington, and the visions of candidates outside the mainstream tend to fall by the wayside. And the perspectives and questions of the electorate beyond a roughly defined mainstream often are treated as marginal and dispensable.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the scope of our coverage indeed moved beyond the mainstream candidates to a slightly wider circle of players - but largely in terms of our fascination with the craft of politicking. Increasingly, we have analyzed the intricacies of political campaigning. Our sources now include campaign strategists, pollsters, spin doctors and other political industry players, and all too often we are perceived as reporting not only about diem, but exclusively for diem.
Now, in the 1990s, a growing number of journalists and media institutions have come to see that political coverage should entail a far more complex and diverse undertaking. On the face of public hostility toward politicians and journalists alike, we are becoming more aware of the "other" players in a political contest - the potential electorate. We're beginning to wipe clean our lenses.
Why? And why now?
American journalists have long looked at a certain diversity in our coverage strategies as not only desirable but emblematic of good journalism. Fundamental news gathering precepts such as multisourcing, balance, fairness and accuracy - even the notion of objectivity itself - all explicitly or implicitly are arguments for diversified coverage.
Reporting that fails to acknowledge the views of substantive players on an issue is slanted reporting. Reporting that allows candidates to pander to the fears or dreams of their dominant constituencies leads to bad campaigning, to demagoguery, or worse. We know that such reporting means myopic politics and leads to poor public policy. A growing cadre of journalists has begun to acknowledge that the questions we ask determine the depth or breadth of the visions candidates will articulate. And we know that whose questions are asked determine the richness or shallowness of the political conversation and of our reporting.
The challenge for many of us is in how to expand our knowledge of our complex communities - where to look for the voices and questions out of our immediate vision.
Ironically, some of the tools for doing this have long been used in our media institutions - but not by journalists. Our marketing, circulation and advertising departments have been quite adept at identifying, targeting and filtering Audiences of appeal to advertisers and funders. We need to make our newsrooms just as savvy, but with the purpose of inclusion - of clear, sharp, truthful and smart reporting.
For political journalists, this means hard work. It means looking at demographic data and polling as imperfect but potentially useful reporting tools - not as mere numbers stories. It means developing an understanding of the complexity of the communities we cover so that no significant viewpoint is given short shrift. It means achieving a clear vision that enables us to see our coverage turf as what it is, and not as what cultural blinders would have us imagine. It means fighting the notion that the ideal demographic quintiles coveted by advertisers are the only relevant comers of our communities worth reaching and understanding.
For reporters, it means we must meet people with whom we are not comfortable, whom we might not understand, who might not share our values and whose agenda might give us trepidation. To journalists, regardless of assignment, it means other things we are not accustomed to doing.
It means opening our newsroom doors and op-ed pages to new voices of unaccustomed timbre and lingo.
It means tapping into new streams of thought and information - beyond those conveniently located near our traditional beat outposts (City Hall, the Courts, Police HQ, Main Street). It means expanding and updating Rolodexes. It entails challenging our own assumptions and those of our sources, sometimes with counter-intuitive thought that goes against established truths.
In the end, though, it means just what Buddy Davis urged his budding journalists to do - keeping our heads up, our lenses clean, and taking no wooden nickels.