This morning Mitt Romney gave a public speech about religious freedom and being Mormon. I took a handful of phone calls from editors and news directors struggling with their coverage.
“If we just broadcast the whole thing live,” asked one radio producer in Boston, “isn’t that unfair to the other candidates?”
It is rare for a candidate’s speech to be of such interest. Most of the time, running the whole thing isn’t even a question, because it would be too boring.
But one could argue that Romney’s speech is of particular interest and not just to Mormons. Thanks to Romney’s prominence, Christians everywhere are debating who gets to call themselves Christians. Believers, politicos… the potential audience for this campaign speech was wide.
It’s an example of how journalism values collide. If you are serving your audience, you are giving them the information they want and need. To that end, Romney’s speech could be worthy of live broadcast and even a reprint in its entirety. Yet if you are committed to fairly covering all the candidates, you have to have some form of accountability. Maybe it’s counting up the minutes of broadcast time for each candidate, maybe it’s comparing column inches. However you measure fairness, time and space have got to figure into to it.
Although the FCC policy known as the Fairness Doctrine died in 1987, most newsrooms today. including print newsrooms, strive to provide equal and compelling coverage.
Many of today’s callers asked me something along the lines of: Just because we aren’t legally required to provide response time to the other candidates, don’t you think we should? Or this one: If we broadcast the speech in its entirety, aren’t we becoming Romney’s mouthpiece?
Fairness cannot be achieved by a minute-for-minute or inch-for-inch accounting of coverage. And independence isn’t lost, when you give your audience something of substance it wants and needs. Journalists today must determine how they can be loyal to their audience first, preserve their independence and demonstrate fairness to political candidates. That’s not an easy path to negotiate.
It starts with a strategy for political coverage that promises to get relevant information to the audience in a way that is interesting and easy to consume. But that strategy also requires flexibility, so when one candidate garners the headlines, journalists begin looking for ways to hear from other candidates in a way that won’t seem formulaic and boring to the audience.
The Internet affords most newsrooms newfound alternatives. Where editors must be more judicious about finite resources like airtime and newsprint, the Internet offers freedom. The Romney speech is a great example. Some news directors were uneasy about broadcasting the entire speech. Others concluded that 35 minutes on religion is more than even a motivated audience could tolerate. Both groups could post the text and audio to the Internet, where interested users could partake and all others could pass.
Balanced political coverage in newsrooms is a time-honored struggle. We’re living in a time where answers to the problem are only as limited as our creativity.
