Political campaigns have always been nasty. Accusations of vile character — true, false or in between — are as old as politics.
The history of U.S. political commentary is filled with published attacks of the most scurrilous kind, going back to the days when journalist James Callender accused Alexander Hamilton of plundering the federal treasury for $50 million.
Most of today’s newspapers try to hold themselves to a higher standard: Cover the races even-handedly, tell readers what separates each candidate from the other, fairly represent their debates and differences, sort out which campaign statements readers can believe and which they cannot. And, avoid trafficking in rumor.
It’s that last part that gets trickier every year, primarily for two reasons:
1. The Internet has become an instantaneous and widespread source of rumor and innuendo. Any savvy blogger can scattershoot any accusation, no matter how outrageous or untrue, further and faster than any newspaper can.
2. Televised political advertising is more freewheeling than ever before.
Gone, it often appears, are the days when newspapers could serve as gatekeepers for their readers, electing to withhold rumors or accusations from publication until reporters had the chance to check them out and gauge their worth.
Some people will say that’s good — that the paper’s responsibility is to print the news and let readers decide what is believable. The argument has merit, but it stretches the definition of “news,” and ignores our responsibility to confirm stories and to not publish things we know to be untrue.
The Plain Dealer walked that line with a Page One story last Thursday.
Under the headline, “Tabloid-style claims twist governor’s race,” Columbus bureau chief Ted Wendling shined a light on some of the charges that have been directed at Democratic candidate Ted Strickland in the closing weeks of an increasingly unsavory campaign.
Not a person I’ve talked to in the newsroom — not Wendling, not the editor who assigned the story, not editor Doug Clifton — believed any of the accusations. I’m not going to recount them here, but all had to do with allegations of various sex-related charges against Strickland, to the point where the frustrated candidate found himself asserting his heterosexuality in a recent meeting with reporters and editors at the Cincinnati Enquirer.
All the allegations were checked by Plain Dealer reporters and found to be unsupported, meaningless or distorted. Ten years ago, that story would never have seen the light of day.
So why did it run this year? Because it would have been irresponsible, unfair to Strickland and unfair to our readers NOT to run it.
Republican candidate Ken Blackwell had used a debate to accuse Strickland of a long-discredited charge of covering for a former campaign aide who had been in trouble with the law. A Cincinnati radio host went on Fox News’ “Hannity and Colmes Show” with another accusation. The head of the Ohio Taxpayers Association began using his blog to spread rumors that even he cautioned were unsubstantiated.
And, suddenly, readers who had heard about the debate, or seen the Hannity show, or read the blogs, were calling and writing to ask why The Plain Dealer was covering up the “facts” about Ted Strickland.
There comes a tipping point in a situation like this, when the weight of the rumors and misinformation overcomes the resistance to play into the traffickers’ hands by repeating them. That juncture had clearly been reached.
“At some point, ignoring charges has the effect of buttressing them,” said Clifton. “At that point, it is unfair not to expose the charges for what they are.”
Predictably, Wendling’s story got lots of reader reaction — most, he says, from people who thanked him for squaring the record.
“But there was a significant minority who chastised me for taking shots at Strickland,” he said. “Some of his supporters thought we had allowed ourselves to be pawns of Blackwell.”
That’s the danger in running corrective stories, and that’s why they should be done sparingly. During the last presidential election, a rumor took root and spread that Democratic candidate John Kerry had had an affair with one of his interns. The charge was groundless, but after several days and a good bit of internal debate, The Plain Dealer and other newspapers repeated the allegation and blew it to pieces.
Not everyone agreed that publishing the rumor was a good idea — including the reporter who wrote it — but, in the end, the readers got the truth and the rumor died a deserved death.
The dilemma of whether to write about rumors — and when — is one that is certain to come up more frequently in future campaigns, if current trends continue.
So the newspaper remains a gatekeeper after all. The difference is that now, we sometimes have to let the rumors into print before dispatching them to oblivion.
