Newspaper does away with traditional endorsement interview for Ward endorsement
Congratulations go out to Mr. Ward for gaining the endorsement of the Daily Press & Argus. But the one question we have is how did he get that endorsement?
We were shocked when we picked up the newspaper today, then turned to the opinion page and saw the endorsement. We are still waiting for the call from editors to set up the endorsement interview with the editorial board. How does the newspaper conduct its endorsement interviews now? By osmosis?
Every reputable newspaper in America actually sits down with the candidates, at least the local candidates that live in the newspaper’s circulation area, and the editorial board interviews each individual candidate before it makes a decision. The Press & Argus did that, at least until today. You can actually watch the Lansing State Journal’s editorial board interview the candidates for Michigan governor on Michigan Government TV.
When people read these endorsements they believe the newspaper actually interviews the candidates, examines their record and looks at past performance. I have no idea what this endorsement was based on, and I would like to hear the explanation on why it went away from years of newspaper tradition and practice and based an endorsement on, what? Maybe it can tell us in the political notebook because that's the only place we seem to get any mention.
We knew we faced an uphill battle when the wife of the executive editor/general manger contributed to the Ward campaign, and another member was a conservative Republican candidate for the House in 2002, but we mistakenly thought we would at least be treated fairly. Or even that the newspaper would go through the motions to keep up appearances.
When we actually break down what was written in the endorsement it raises more questions than it answers. It talks about Mr. Ward being elected to the Brighton Township Board as a teenager. Great. In this economy what we really need is someone with some real experiences to address our structural economic problems. Someone like Mike McGonegal who has almost 30 years of actual business experience instead of someone who has never worked in the private sector.
Perhaps the only thing I agree with in the editorial is when it says, “Ward is an enthusiastic student of politics.” He has proven that he can play politics, but our problems are far tool serious to continue to play politics. We need someone who can work with both sides of the aisle and has the experiences to work with both business and government to address Michigan’s problems. Ward does not have those qualifications.
It’s funny that the paper has to go all the way back to his days on the Brighton Township Board to say something positive about him. Doers anyone remember the problems with the sanitary sewer system he left behind? In 2000 quarterly rates increased five-fold and again in 2002 an auditor recommended doubling them again.
If Ward gained “additional revenue for Livingston County's under-funded public schools and roads” I’d like to see it. It took the new Governor to get money to the county for the fix of the dangerous Lake Chemung interchange.
Show me one piece of “effective ethics and campaign finance reform laws” that he has passed into law. He has got some alleged campaign finance legislation passed by the House, but he knows the Senate will not approve it. How hard is it to get legislation passed when your party controls the House? To top if off, Rich Robinson, of the nonpartisan Michigan Campaign Finance Network, said in this very newspaper that the legislation favored his party. So that blows away the ridiculous claim that he “willing to work constructively with legislators on both sides of the aisle.”
The exact opposite is true, and we have shown numerous examples of how he has poisoned the atmosphere between the two parties by doing away with simple courtesies like giving the other side the daily schedule and trying to throw a priest out of a hearing for daring to disagree with him.
The newspaper also calls borderline bribery, cronyism, favoritism and violating the very rules you say you’re trying to establish “a few Ward missteps.” That’s ridiculous. A former member of that editorial board, Jack Lessenberry, the former Executive Editor of Hometown Communications that included the Press & Argus before the paper was sold, said this about Ward’s “effective ethics and campaign finance reform laws,”
“That is the moral equivalent of Monica Lewinsky opening a charter school of chastity. If Chris were in another occupation, he might have a mattress strapped to his back. Here’s all you need to know about him. Michigan had a law for years saying that you couldn’t order a bottle of wine from a winery in, say, Napa Valley. The middlemen and their lobbyists were behind that. Outraged, some wine connoisseurs took that all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that Michigan couldn’t discriminate that way. Good old Chris gallantly stepped into the breach — and introduced a bill that would have prevented you and me from buying a bottle of wine from a Michigan winery! That is, not without going through a wholesaler first. Fortunately, he didn’t get away with it.”
To say “He's a perfect example of why term limits, no matter how well-intended, were a bad idea” is really stretching it, and he’s a better example of why we enacted term limits in the first place. The only time politicians are really accountable at all is during elections, but Ward is so confident of victory that he has completely ignored the voters during this election and phoned it in, rarely showed up in the district because he believed people will just elect him without looking at his record, just like the newspaper did.
posted by Communications guru @ 10:40 AM
14 Comments:
Wow, they didn't even interview him!? That's absurd!
Thank you for your comments, Nirmal. I agree. Every newspaper in American bases its endorsements on face-to-face endorsement interviews.
People are starting to catch on to the fact that most major papers and television stations are owned by corporations that are to a large degree Republican, and seek to control their message in order to further advance their issues. This is an insult to the American public who have the intelligence to make up their own minds.
The Daily Press & Argus can endorse whomever they please, but that endorsement is simply an opinion tempered by a "good ole boy" mentality. Big business and the MSM always seem to stick together.
Thanks for the post, Kathy. I am loathe to criticize the MSM because I know the individuals are hard-working people who are trying their best to be as fair as possible with deadline pressures and not nearly the money other professionals receive. I also resent the right’s more than 30-year smear campaign against an entire profession with that “liberal media bias” BS. But I think that smear campaign, corporate ownership and consolidation have swung the pendulum to the right.
It’s not so much that he got the endorsement that bothers me, because I had no trouble debunking the reasons they had for making it, but the unfairness of making it based on nothing.
"We knew we faced an uphill battle when the wife of the executive editor/general manger contributed to the Ward campaign"
Are you joking? You honestly think this played any role at all in anything? You think all the members of the Editorial Board were sitting around talking about how they all wanted to endorse Mike, and the executive editor/general manager walked in and said, "Whoa, guys! Hold it! We have to endorse Chris Ward! My wife gave him a donation!"
You're grasping at straws and you know it. And don't tell me every newspaper does face to face endorsements before they endorse. I doubt every newspaper in the country interviewed Bush and Kerry in 2004.
You say, "It’s not so much that he got the endorsement that bothers me, because I had no trouble debunking the reasons they had for making it, but the unfairness of making it based on nothing."
You haven't "debunked" anything.
As for the pendulum swinging to the right, if that's true, then why did the Argus endorse Kerry and every other Democrat in sight in 2004?
No, I am not joking, who-ever-you-are. I believe it played a role, as well as the fact that Buddy Moorehouse is a conservative Republican who ran for the state House in 2002. I have no idea how the members of the editorial board reached their decision, but I do know they did not reach it like they have for many years. They did not sit down and conduct a face-to-face interview with the candidate like they have in the past from just about every local candidate from school board candidates to U.S. Congress.
And yes, every newspaper does face-to-face interviews with local candidates before they make endorsements, and it is what the public has come to expect. Of course not every newspaper can do face-to-face interviews with Presidential candidates, but I guarantee the national ones like the NY Times and the Washington Post do. The Press & Argus had a lot more info to make the Kerry endorsement than they did to choose between Mike McGonegal and Ward. The Lansing State Journal did face-to-face interviews with the Governor and the Amway guy, even though they had three televised debates and daily stores and press releases to base a decision on. They even broadcasted the LSJ on Michigan Government TV. Here’s a link, http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=video. If the newspaper had endorsed Mike without an interview it would not carry much weight with me or the voters.
I certainly have debunked it, and if you don’t think I did you, as always, are more than welcome to make your case.
That’s an easy one. Because John Kerry was the best candidate, and the Iraq fiasco, our failed foreign policy and our record budget and trade deficits have proved the endorsement was the right one.
HMMMM. We gave them plenty of reasons to endorse Mike. They already had their minds made up with a set of mystery positions he had to meet. That is called bias. We knew we were not likely to get the endorsement, but we just wanted to be treated fairly. If they no longer hold endorsement interviews like every other newspaper in America the endorsement is pretty much meaningless with no weight or facts behind it.
Kathy you have got to be kidding that the MSM is controled by the right. Are you the only one from your planet to survive the crash?
I will not answer for Kathy, but you have got to be kidding if you think the media is not controlled by the right, hate America. For an example you just need to look right here in good ole Livingston County. We’ll even ignore the make-up of the editorial board and look at its ridiculous endorsement of Chris Ward. In the past this newspaper actually sat down with every candidate and talked one-on-one with them and made an actual informed endorsement decision.
Now that Gannett has bought the Daily Press & Argus, one of the biggest newspaper chains in the world, endorsement decisions apparently come down from corporate HQ in McLean, Va. They don’t even have to meet the candidate.
A few huge corporations own and control almost all of the media in this country, and you honestly believe it’s not rightwing?
This liberal media BS is a GOP political strategy than began with Nixon and has worked so well that people like you buy into it hook, line and sinker without an ounce of proof.
CG even you cannot be that ignorant. Just look at Time, Newsweek. Watch the news, they constantly bash Bush, if it was as you say "Right Wing" whom would allow this. All the current polling (Left wing) is biased as they try to sway the election by stating the demoRats are ahead. Then in the final polling they will post the actually correct numbers so they can then go on to say they were correct, so they can start again with there warped sense of credibility.
Were is there any proof that the media is controlled by the Right on CNN.
THE ARGUMENT over whether the national press is dominated by liberals is over. Since 1962, there have been 11 surveys of the media that sought the political views of hundreds of journalists. In 1971, they were 53 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative. In a 1976 survey of the Washington press corps, it was 59 percent liberal, 18 percent conservative. A 1985 poll of 3,200 reporters found them to be self-identified as 55 percent liberal, 17 percent conservative. In 1996, another survey of Washington journalists pegged the breakdown as 61 percent liberal, 9 percent conservative. Now, the new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found the national media to be 34 percent liberal and 7 percent conservative.
Over 40-plus years, the only thing that's changed in the media's politics is that many national journalists have now cleverly decided to call themselves moderates. But their actual views haven't changed, the Pew survey showed. Their political beliefs are close to those of self-identified liberals and nowhere near those of conservatives. And the proportion of liberals to conservatives in the press, either 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, has stayed the same. That liberals are dominant is now beyond dispute.Does this affect coverage? Is there really liberal bias? The answers are, of course, yes and yes. It couldn't be any other way. Think for a moment if the numbers were reversed and conservatives had outnumbered liberals in the media for the past four decades. Would President Bush be getting kinder coverage? For sure,
and I'll bet any liberal would agree with that.Would President Reagan have been treated with less hostility if the national press was conservative-dominated? Yes, again. And I could go on.
The Pew poll also found that 55 percent of national journalists believe that Bush should be treated more critically by the press than he has been. They think he's gotten off too easy, despite empirical evidence of media Bush bashing. The Center for Media and Public Affairs has examined the coverage of Bush by the broadcast network evening news shows and found only two periods of favorable coverage: in the weeks after September 11 and during the actual war in Iraq. This year, roughly 75 percent of the stories about the Democratic presidential candidates were positive. For Bush, they've been 60-plus percent negative.
Would President Reagan have been treated with less hostility if the national press was conservative-dominated? Yes, again. And I could go on.
The Pew poll also found that 55 percent of national journalists believe that Bush should be treated more critically by the press than he has been. They think he's gotten off too easy, despite empirical evidence of media Bush bashing. The Center for Media and Public Affairs has examined the coverage of Bush by the broadcast network evening news shows and found only two periods of favorable coverage: in the weeks after September 11 and during the actual war in Iraq. This year, roughly 75 percent of the stories about the Democratic presidential candidates were positive. For Bush, they've been 60-plus percent negative.
With the evidence of liberal dominance so overwhelming, a leading press critic is now calling for more ideological diversity in the media. Tom Rosenstiel, who helped design the Pew poll and who runs the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says it's necessary not to think just of diversity that makes newsrooms "look like America," but to create a press corps that "thinks like America."
In truth, the effort to hire more minorities and women has had the effect of making the media more liberal. Both these groups tend to have liberal politics, and this is accentuated by the fact that many of the women recruited into journalism are young and single, precisely those with the most liberal views. "By diversifying the profession in one way," Rosenstiel says, "they were making it more homogenous in another."
Those who still doubt the press needs fresh, preferably conservative, blood, should consider these numbers: In 1999, 12 percent of journalists said fairness and balance were a big problem for the media. Now, in the Pew survey, only 5 percent say so--this, after further proof of liberal dominance and noisy debates about liberal bias. And in 1999, 11 percent said ethics and standards were a major concern. But after high-visibility scandals involving fabricated stories and controversies about plagiarism, only 5 percent agree today. The case for ideological realignment of the media is closed.
Hate America even you cannot be that ignorant. Are you serious? Bush Bashing? If the press had been more critical of the reasons for the Iraq fiasco and the justification for it we might not have invaded that country.
To be totally honest, I really do not have any hard proof that the media is biased to the right, at least the mainstream media outlets that does not include fox news, so I’ll drop that argument. But you also have zero proof that the media is biased to the left, so you should drop that argument too. It’s sad that for almost 30 years a noble and honorable profession has been smeared just for political gain.
There is no way that having a few huge corporations owning all the media outlets is a good thing for the press, the people and for unbiased investigative journalism and editorial opinion. You just need to look at the Detroit Free Press and Daily Press & Argus endorsement of our opponent. In the past, the local newspaper did its homework, actually interviewed the candidates and based the endorsement on due diligence. That did not happen here. The P & A did not conduct an interview before it endorsed and the Free Press, which is owned by the same company Gannett, made its endorsement with no contact at all with Mike. Since when is a corporate decision made hundreds of miles away a good thing for the local community?
You give me these arguments with no links at all to your alleged sources. Here’s a link to the Pew Study that shows “…most Americans continue to say that they like mainstream news outlets. By wide margins, more Americans give favorable than unfavorable ratings to their daily newspaper.” http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=248.
You know what? I don’t care if every journalist in America is a hardcore liberal. What you are forgetting is that they are professionals with the goal of presenting unbiased news. I also know of no requirement that says you must be a liberal to get into journalism school, nor is it ever a requirement to be a liberal on a job interview.
You say “That liberals are dominant is now beyond dispute.” I not only dispute it, I say, so what? “Does this affect coverage? Is there really liberal bias? “ The answer is no, and no, and if you believe the opposite show me some proof.
You talk about plagiarism and fabricated stories. Now that is where I can agree with you. That’s the major problem that needs to be addressed. Another huge problem that needs to be addressed is with consolidation of media outlets. The bottom line is profit and nothing else. Critical, in-depth coverage is lacking. Far too-many times the press takes this president at his word and fails to be critical and skeptical of it.
I know it’s a waste of time to try and reason with someone with the ridiculous and offensive name of “liberals hate America,” but there are other reasonable people out there.
All you had to do was watch 60 minutes last nite to see liberal left wing media at its best.
That’s the best argument you can come up with, hate America? Sad, just sad. Why do I bother trying to reason with a closed mind? Again, there is so such thing as “liberal left wing media.” You have been so brainwashed by the disgusting 30-year strategy of a smear campaign that you bought into it hook, line and sinker without an ounce of proof. If it’s so obvious show me a small sample of the allegedly overwhelming proof.
Just as I stated in the above post is it not amazing that the newest polls are shifting. They post the false liberal tilted results in the beginning to try to sway the election and in the end they post the correct numbers as to be deemed correct in the end.
Is it not amazing that the party that spouts fair and honest elections would stoop as to say that the right will stay home (And have the left wing media portray it as such)as they are to mad at Bush and the Republician congress to vote and want to teach them a lesson.
Did Howie Dean dream up that talking point?
Here's the evidence:
* Pollsters Scott Rasmussen and John Zogby both show Republican Bob Corker gaining on Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, a must-win Senate seat for the Democrats. Zogby has Corker ahead by seven, while Rasmussen still shows a Ford edge of two points.
* Zogby reports a "turnaround" in New Jersey's Senate race with the GOP candidate Tom Kean taking the lead, a conclusion shared by some other public polls.
* Even though Sen. Jim Talent in Missouri is still under the magic 50 percent threshold for an incumbent, Rasmussen has him one point ahead and Zogby puts him three up. But unless he crests 50 percent, he'll probably still lose.
* Even though he is a lost cause, both Rasmussen and Zogby show Montana's Republican Sen. Conrad Burns cutting the gap and moving up.
* In Virginia, Republican embattled incumbent Sen. George Allen has now moved over the 50 percent threshold in his internal polls. (He'd been at 48 percent.)
Nationally, Zogby reports that the generic Democratic edge is down to four points, having been as high as nine two weeks ago.
None of these data indicates that the Republicans are out of trouble yet, but Democrats must win one of these three races: Ford in Tennessee, Menendez in New Jersey or Webb in Virginia. If not, they'll fall at least one seat short of controlling the Senate even if they succeed in knocking off all five vulnerable GOP incumbents in Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Missouri.
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