The joy of being scooped
The New York Times recently reported that John Edwards’ nonprofit organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, was apparently created as a device by which he could essentially run a presidential campaign while also sidestepping federal scrutiny because, hey, he’s fighting poverty. Politics? What politics?
It was a perfectly appropriate story for this campaign season, casting a skeptical eye on a fellow who has positioned himself as the candidate most pained by poverty. Edwards may be sincere in portraying himself as a friend to the poor, and I tend to believe he is sincere, but as the Times makes clear he’s not above using poverty to game the system of campaign regulation.
Edwards’ hometown paper (and my former employer), the News & Observer of Raleigh, ran the NYT piece a few days ago. A natural question arises: Why is the N&O letting somebody else do this reporting? This is its turf.
I don’t know the answer, but I can take a guess. The Times simply picked off a story in the N&O’s backyard, and the local paper had two reactions available to it: Either ignore the story or swallow hard and run somebody else’s reporting. The responsible thing to do, if you’re truly interested in the timely supplying of information to readers, is to run the NYT story. So that’s what the N&O did, and that was the right choice.
But the other thing this little inter-industry drama reveals is the difficulty any mid- or small-market news organization faces when a local person makes a serious run for president.
Simply put, it is difficult for a local paper like the N&O to cover a homeboy’s presidential candidacy with the kind of bulldog vigor it brings to other events. There’s much more uniquely at stake than is the case with other stories. If John Edwards gets elected president, an enormous boom will hit the Triangle, boosting both its economy and its image. Local people will get important jobs in Washington. Politics, already a big business in Raleigh, will become even more of an economic engine. There conceivably could be a presidential library located here someday. The collective ego of a community gets more invested in the prospect of a local fellow being president than it does by the prospect of, say, Toyota building a huge job-generating, economy-enriching assembly plant in the area.
So how much unflattering coverage of the local candidate can a newspaper produce before it seems to be intent on killing the golden egg-laying goose?
It’s a fine line. If there’s not enough tough reporting, the newspaper quickly becomes seen as a cheerleader. Too much tough reporting, and the paper comes across as unreasonably antagonistic. Getting that balance right is harder than most readers can imagine.
Sometimes, having another news organization pick off an important story unfavorable to the local candidate — which the hometown paper can then publish itself, but with ready-made deniability of ill intent — isn’t an embarrassment at all. It’s a gift.