At Pres. Obama’s news conference two days ago, Kevin Chappelle from the Newark Examiner asked what might be called an outlier (but not a “softball“) question:
… A recent report found that, as a result of the economic downturn, 1 in 50 children are now homeless in America. With shelters at full capacity, tent cities are sprouting up across the country.
In passing your stimulus package, you said that help was on the way. But what would you say to these families, especially children, who are sleeping under bridges and in tents across the country?
Obama’s answer was non-specific, but that’s not my point here. The day after the presser, Politico put up a self-indulgent navel-gazing story about how Obama snubbed the major daily newspapers in favor of smaller news outlets and broadcast media. (TMV’s very own Joe Gandelman had a good post about it yesterday.)
Here is an extended quotation from the Politico piece:
Haynes Johnson – the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post reporter who’s now a professor at the University of Maryland – said it was “extraordinary and telling” that “for the first time in the history of the presidential press conference, an American president declined to call on any representatives of the major U.S. newspapers.”
Johnson said the snub “signals a deliberate effort by the Obama White House to denigrate the major newspapers.”
“Politically, I believe this decision will not help the president,” Johnson said. “He has had, until recently, the most positive press of any president in our times, or maybe ever. Clearly, with the economic crisis spreading, that favorable tone has been much less so of late. While the news business, especially newspapers, are in perilous economic condition, and yes, this seems like a heavy-handed blow adding insult to injury, the president needs all the support he can get now. Last night’s action won’t help him with the newspapers, and this strikes me as both baffling and needless from Obama’s standpoint.”
Charlotte Hall, president [sic] of the American Society of Newspaper Editors President [sic], also admitted to being disappointed that the president bypassed the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal in favor of questions from the TV networks, Univision, Stars and Stripes, the Washington Times and POLITICO.
“Newspapers do the majority of watchdog and investigative reporting in the country. Newspapers also ask tough questions at news conferences,” said Hall, the editor of the Orlando Sentinel.
“With their burgeoning online audiences, their reporting has reach and impact. So I was disappointed the president did not call on any reporters from the major papers. I hope he will be responsive to their questions in the future, not because that might help ‘save’ newspapers, but because they produce the strongest and most in-depth reporting on national affairs.”
Do they now?
Let’s take a look again at Kevin Chappelle’s question at the news conference (my emphasis)
… A recent report found that, as a result of the economic downturn, 1 in 50 children are now homeless in America. With shelters at full capacity, tent cities are sprouting up across the country.
In passing your stimulus package, you said that help was on the way. But what would you say to these families, especially children, who are sleeping under bridges and in tents across the country?
Now, let’s turn to the New York Times. In yesterday’s online edition, we find an article by Jesse McKinley, headlined, “Cities Deal With a Surge in Shantytowns.” Here are the first two paragraphs:
As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.
“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”
I realize, of course, that articles like this don’t get researched, written, and published overnight. Obviously, Mr. McKinley started working on this piece before Tuesday night’s news conference. That said, newspapers don’t always publish feature articles like this one as soon as they are completed and turned in. The paper’s editors might hold so-called “human interest” stories that are not breaking news or ongoing coverage of breaking news until some kind of external event provides a “hook” to make the piece timely.
You’ve probably figured out my point by now. The major dailies may or may not always “produce the strongest and most in-depth reporting on national affairs.” Sometimes, it seems, they follow a much smaller, even obscure, publication’s lead. Does anyone believe, given the timing of this NYT article — one day after a small-time journalist (in terms of name recognition, not reporting chops) raised a question that no one else had brought up about American families living in tent cities and under bridges — that the Times would have dropped McKinley’s article in the March 25 edition had it not been for a question asked on March 24 by a reporter who would not even have had the chance to ask that question under the previous administration?
Or, to put it a bit more succinctly, Charlotte Hall and Haynes Johnson can take their smug, self-satisfied, arrogant presumptions about the major dailies’ central place in Americans’ lives, and shove it in an upward direction to a place where the sun don’t shine.
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