DENVER, CO — While the midterms are over here in America’s favorite swing state, that doesn’t mean reporters are taking a breather from political coverage. They’re writing stories about what happened: how the Republican wave crashed on the Rockies (Democratic Sen. Mark Udall lost, while incumbent Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper held on), how the GOP’s ground game, the state’s new election laws, and dynamic candidates disrupted a decade of Democratic rule, and how whatever narrative is gelling might not be accurate depending on how you look at it.
And yesterday, on the campus of the University of Colorado in downtown Denver, five of the state’s top political journalists showed up for a panel discussion on the highs and lows of campaign coverage this year and took questions from an audience of about 40. Jason Salzman, a communications consultant, blogger and former media critic for the defunct Rocky Mountain News, moderated the panel with conservative consultant Kelly Maher of Compass Colorado. The University of Colorado’s School of Public Affairs also sponsored the event.
Below are some highlights from the discussion:
Candidates controlled the narrative — but they shouldn’t
This campaign season in Colorado was a little different, said political reporter Peter Marcus of The Durango Herald, because of the very narrow agendas of the campaigns, particularly in the US Senate race. “What did we have one narrative, maybe two narratives? The biggest obviously being the War on Women and all of that — we’re talking about Gardner and Udall especially — and so you just had the reporting, the fodder, the attacks, everything, was relegated to within this one narrative.”
For Associated Press reporter Nick Riccardi, that was part of the reason he didn’t feel he was able to report on the Colorado campaigns as best he could this year. For better or worse, he said, a lot of coverage reflected the choices made by campaigns.
“I tried to think outside the box as much as I could, but I didn’t do as much as I should,” he said. “I think that’s maybe a reflection of my failings, but also I think that it is a reminder that campaigns set the narrative, campaigns have a fair amount of power over what gets published and what doesn’t … There’s a lot that we could have done that didn’t get written … it’s hard to do those stories inside that structure of the campaign.” It was apparently a learning experience. For the next big election, Riccardi said he plans to “just walk away from the whole circus” and try to find stories outside the scripted campaign schedule. (In October, I touched on some of this for CJR; you can read about earlier coverage of the Colorado gubernatorial race here, and the Senate race here).
Moderator Salzman made the obvious point: “You hope that journalists step in and ask questions that are aggressive to move the debate.”
Harder for female reporters to get tough with a candidate?
Not surprisingly, there was discussion about a now legendary interview segment in which Eli Stokols of KDVR in Denver pressed Republican US Senate candidate Cory Gardner on why he didn’t support a state personhood ballot measure but did support federal personhood legislation — the candidate said four times there is no federal personhood bill, which prompted Stokols to cite Factcheck.org and say at one point, “Do you really think that just telling me that it’s not a personhood bill makes it not?” Denver’s CBS Channel 4 reporter Shaun Boyd said it would have been hard for her to take a similar approach.
“I think when a female reporter does that, frankly, I don’t think she’s viewed as tough as much as she’s viewed as a b-word,” Boyd said.
Colorado media gave down ballot races the shaft
While the marquee races for governor, US Senate and Congress took up plenty of ink and broadband, the down ballot races for statewide office and the legislature got short shrift. The Denver Post’s politics editor, Chuck Plunkett, said if the paper had more resources he would have liked the opportunity to dispatch reporters to better cover the battle over the state Senate, which flipped to the Republicans this year. “We didn’t really cover the secretary of state race, we didn’t really cover the treasurer’s race, or the attorney general’s race, to the degree that I would have liked to have done it,” he said.
