It is understood in most newsrooms that readers, or viewers, don’t care how difficult it is to report a story. Just give me the news, don’t tell me how hard you had to work to get it. But there are occasions when the battle to get the story becomes the story.
Such is the case in the U.S. Senate race in Nevada. The campaign has drawn national media attention, which is not surprising given that polls show that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in a tough race against former state legislator Sharron Angle, who rode a wave of support from the tea party movement to win the Republican nomination.
But while national media outlets are weighing in on the campaign, many local newspapers, television stations and radio stations in Nevada are having trouble getting basic information for their stories.
That’s because Angle has chosen to ignore them — and their questions — in favor of more conservative (and presumably more friendly) media outlets. And that makes it difficult for voters in Nevada who are trying to decide how to cast their vote this fall.
“A candidate must be transparent and available to the press so that we can hear and see them,” Sam King, president of the League of Women Voters of Nevada, told me in an e-mail. “Candidates should be available and able to answer questions to the media, in debates and in open forums.”
It’s not new to have a candidate build a powerful communication machine that bypasses media and goes straight to the audience; Barack Obama and Sara Palin both have created such beasts. But Angle is making it an exclusive means of communication.
Angle has done interviews with the Christian Broadcasting Network and Fox News. Like most candidates, she has a Facebook page, where she can reach out directly to more than 26,000 “friends” to criticize Reid or promote her latest interview with Fox. Just over 1,000 people follow her Twitter feed and 185 people subscribe to her YouTube channel.
But she has been reluctant to answer questions from local journalists in Nevada. One video that has made the rounds shows a television reporter chasing Angle to her car after Angle declined to take questions at her own press event.
“She sees people in the media as either ‘friendlies’ or ‘non-friendlies,’” said Ray Hagar, chief political reporter at the Reno Gazette-Journal, who covered Angle during her years in the state assembly. “That’s why she will go on Fox News or CBN.”
That means Nevada voters are less likely to see how Angle handles tough questions about votes she cast while in the state legislature or about positions she has taken on issues facing the country and Nevada today. They are more likely to see a quick sound-bite from a speech or footage of Angle’s back as she walks away from reporters. Nevada newspapers have found themselves, on occasion, relying on quotes from one of Angle’s national media interviews.
David Damore, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said people who watch or read the conservative media outlets that Angle has talked with probably already support her candidacy. That may help her raise money for her campaign, he said, but it won’t reach the voters in the middle who could determine who wins.
“Her strategy is a little puzzling,” Damore told me in an interview. “She’s really ceding the narrative to Harry Reid. Reid is relentless in pounding her, and the net result is the campaign has been about her and not about Harry Reid. She wants the opposite. The story is going on without her participation, which is a negative for her.”
I tried to catch up with Angle’s campaign to ask about her strategy, but I couldn’t reach anyone by phone or e-mail.
Howard Kurtz, who covers the media for The Washington Post, recently noted in his column that some of the most conservative Republicans running for Congress this year, including Angle and Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, believe the mainstream media is out to get them. “Both seem to think the media’s primary role should be to help them — raise money, carry a message — rather than hold them accountable,” Kurtz wrote.
Kurtz cited Angle’s interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network. Angle told Brody she was not “running from the media,” but that “the whole point of an interview is to use it, like they say ‘earned media’ to earn something with it, and I’m not going to earn anything from people who are there to badger me and use my words to batter me with … Will they let me say, ‘I need $25 from a million people, go to SharronAngle.com, send money’?”
In an interview with Fox News broadcast Sunday, Angle indicated that she wishes the media could be more friendly.
“We needed to have the press be our friend,” she said. Fox interviewer Carl Cameron pressed back: “Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend?”
Angle responded that the press could “ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported.”
Hugh Jackson, a former newspaper editor who tracks Nevada politics on the Las Vegas Gleaner blog, says Angle’s efforts to avoid local reporters has probably been welcomed by local television stations.
“They’ve had loads of fun and garnered national attention showing clips of Angle scurrying away from their pesky cameras,” Jackson told me in an e-mail. “That’s a much easier story to tell then, say, examining whether corporations are sitting on $1.4 trillion in cash and not hiring people because they’re afraid of the government, as Angle contends, or if in fact corporations simply aren’t hiring because there isn’t any consumer demand for their goods and services.
“To do that story, stations would have to give an experienced, informed and economically literate reporter, assuming they had one, time and resources,” he continued. “Footage of Angle silently and obliviously darting into a waiting SUV is not only a cheaper and simpler story, but much better TV.”
Hagar, of the Reno Gazette-Journal, has been one of the few members of the Fourth Estate in Nevada to get an interview with Angle since she won the primary. He did it by walking up to her house and knocking on the door. “If I hadn’t done that, I’m not sure I would have gotten it,” he said.
“When you meet Sharron, she’s a very nice lady,” Hagar said. “She’s kind of soft-spoken, doesn’t seem threatening at all. I think people like her. But I don’t think that comes across when you have to win or lose on TV.”
Kelly Scott, who edits political coverage for the Gazette-Journal, says journalists in Nevada will find a way to give voters what they need even if Angle won’t talk with them. Journalists can still track down her voting record in the legislature, talk with people who have worked with her, and review past articles to see what she’s said and done about various issues.
Angle took a few questions from reporters on Monday following a speech before the Nevada Republican Men’s Club. But first she poked fun at the media when she momentarily lost her voice and breath during her speech. “I’ve been running from the press so much,” she joked, according to an account in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Damore, the political science professor, said he suspects Angle will eventually open up to local reporters in Nevada, after she’s raised more money and put her campaign staff together. But he said it may be too late.
Damore said undecided voters “aren’t going to go to blogs and more specialized media outlets. They see the local TV broadcasts and newspapers. The narrative is being built with or without her.”
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