Two political parties. Two fund-raisers. Same day. Same location — but only one gets news coverage in a presidential election year. This combination led to some complaints about Journal coverage — and lack of coverage — of two political events that happened on the same day.
Local political fund-raisers were held recently by the two major parties on the same day and in the same hotel, but the Journal wrote only one story.
”Bush leadership praised at GOP fund-raiser” read the headline on the June 28 story. It ran across the top of the local section. The smaller headline below said, ”Official: Election crucial for security.”
The story was about the speech given by former New York City Police Department Commissioner Bernard Kerik at a Dutchess County GOP fund-raiser.
Kerik recently served as interim minister of the interior in Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority. He told the crowd at the local fund-raiser that the security of the country depended on continuity in leadership.
Earlier on the same day, former New York City Public Advocate and mayoral candidate Mark Green gave a speech to county Democrats, also gathered for a fund-raiser.
Green talked about the need for a change in national leadership, said Jane Barber Smith, vice chairman of the Dutchess County Democratic Party.
Other than printing a notice ahead of time, the Journal did not write a story about the Democratic event. Besides not covering the event, Smith said the headline on the GOP fund-raiser story was partisan.
”The headline hit me right between the eyes,” she told me by phone, considering her party had been in the same place that day and received no coverage.
Reader Pat Barry agreed, adding in a letter to the editor and in an e-mail to this column that the combination of these words — ”Bush,” ”GOP” and ”fund-raiser” — made it partisan.
Political fund-raisers can be fairly common, and editors often choose not to provide coverage unless a speaker is particularly interesting or newsworthy. In this case, we told Barry, editors decided that Kerik’s position and connections to Iraq made him newsworthy.
Barry replied. ”Then I would have expected the headline to include the words ‘Kerik’ and ‘Iraq.’ ”
Though Green’s appearance wasn’t covered, a spokesperson for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry was contacted for comment and quoted in the Journal story about Kerik’s speech.
Though unintentional and justifiable within news standards, the Journal treatment of the story could be interpreted as a snub of the Democratic event. The reaction from local Democrats shows how intense the scrutiny becomes when politics heats up. Editors later discussed the fairness of what happened, and the perception by Democrats.
The lesson for the Journal is that the reason the newspaper covers political events in the first place must be clear in the presentation of the story. Without that, readers could get the wrong idea.
