At many community newspapers, treatment of the presidential election may be limited to online polls of your readers’ opinions, or their letters. But this is a race for president like no other, where facts and issues have taken a far back seat to entertainment, personality and character assassination, and it’s unlikely to get better now that we have the two most unpopular nominees in the history of polling.
Why should smaller newspapers devote more space to the race? If dailies rely on The Associated Press, the coverage won’t be localized. If weeklies just stick to local news, they will ignore a major topic of discussion among their readers, many of whom don’t read a daily. Covering the race can help you build and maintain a brand as the most authoritative local source of news and information.
As the primary campaigns ended, many journalists acknowledged that they had done a poor job of holding the nominees and other candidates accountable for their statements, and vowed to do better. But at last month’s conventions, timely fact-checking was rare. All of us in American journalism need to share the load.
You can do fact-checking on your own, but it might be better to start by using one of the three main, nonpartisan services that do a good job of holding politicians accountable.
FactCheck.org, the oldest of these services, is part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which is run by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, perhaps America’s leading academic authority on deceptive techniques in political campaigns.
FactCheck was started in 2003 by Brooks Jackson, who was an investigative reporter for the AP and The Wall Street Journal before going to CNN, where he was an early leader in ad watches and fact checks. He remains editor emeritus, and has been succeeded by Eugene Kiely, a former editor at USA Today and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
FactCheck is the service I like best, partly because you can use it for free, as long as you give credit. I also like it because it usually goes into greater depth than the other services. It reviews TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. It takes donations and reveals contributors of more than $1,000.
Just two letters and a space different is Fact Checker, a service of The Washington Post, overseen by Glenn Kessler, a veteran reporter who is from Cincinnati and has covered a wide range of subjects and been business editor.
The Fact Checker is known in the political community for its Pinocchios, which Kessler awards on a 1-2-3-4 scale for falsehood, except during the political party conventions. We used it to fact-check the conventions on The Rural Blog. Here’s the first example of that. The Post doesn’t mind the reprints as long as you give credit.
The other fact-checking service, PolitiFact, also uses a gimmick to categorize falsehoods: the trademarked Truth-O-Meter, which ranges from True to Pants on Fire. Not every statement fits neatly into a pigeonhole, but entertaining labels can be useful. It also has an “Obameter” that measures the president’s promise-keeping.
PolitiFact is a service of the Tampa Bay Times, which is owned by The Poynter Institute, widely respected for its journalism training. The service and the paper make much of their independence, and the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting that the service won for its work in the 2008 presidential election.
PolitiFact offers its service for a modest fee, and has franchised its brand to news outlets in 18 states, including newspapers in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. In those states, you’ll have to check with the papers for their republication policies.
I did a webinar on political fact checking for the Iowa Newspaper Foundation and the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association in 2012, which still available at http://www.onlinemediacampus.com/2012/05/political-reporting.
Show where your community fits into the state and national landscape. Do a story with graphics about your county’s voting history. Get the demographics to show how turnouts and age cohorts vary from election to election. Turnout is higher and younger, but still not very young, in presidential years. Do the election results reflect the national trend of greater political division among precincts? Voter registration can also show long-term trends. Is your county becoming more Democratic, more Republican or more independent? Such data are easy to get, and so are comments from local political leaders.
Other easy-to-get data reveal campaign contributors. Look them up by ZIP code at www.fec.gov, where you can get familiar with the reports and www.OpenSecrets.org, which has the best search functions and will do a custom search for a small fee. Then ask the contributors why they gave. These are people with a greater stake in the outcome than most.
You can also find the biggest political and social issue advertisers at https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/facebook-political-advertising-analysis/.
Every community has issues affected by the race: the economy, jobs, tax policy, farm policy, immigration, education, energy, the environment, social issues, national security and use of American forces (which are disproportionately rural in origin). Identify the issues that are most important to your readers, and the local people involved in them; tell the issue stories with their help and with information from reliable online sources, going beyond the press releases and platform statements.
College professors can also be good observers. They can have their biases, but are usually up-front about them and willing to give you names of other authorities who disagree with them.
Don’t be satisfied with just running opinions. Your readers deserve the facts, and they’re not hard to find. When it comes to opinion, don’t feel obliged to run letters repeating debunked claims or gross misrepresentations. Your newspaper should provide more light than heat. And those online polls? Be honest and tell your readers they are not scientific gauges of opinion.