Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404120016
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans Associate editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Clute and Goode hope - they haven't qualified for the ballot yet - to challenge incumbent Charles Robb in the June 14 Democratic primary for the Senate seat that James Miller and Oliver North are also seeking by way of the Republican nomination to be decided at that party's June 4 state convention.
The epistle is curious not because its writer, Carolyn M. Byerly of Radford University's journalism faculty, finds fault with news articles of March 23, analyzing Goode's entry into the race, and of March 24, reporting the results of a public-opinion poll that didn't ask about Clute, and with an editorial of March 25, welcoming Goode into the contest. America has become a nation of media critics; such fault-finding is an everyday occurrence.
Nor is Byerly's ardent support of Clute a curiosity. Clute's candidacy has several virtues to recommend it - a point that we've made editorially on several occasions, though Byerly seems to have missed it.
No, what's curious is how someone who claims a measure of expertise in newspapering understands the business so poorly.
Perhaps this is the result of the blinker effect of political passion, rather than permanent blindness. Even so, it's curious that Byerly evidently believes that news and editorial-page decisions on political coverage are made by the same people. She practically implies, too, that because a newspaper in its editorials agrees with a candidate on a number of issues, it should therefore (a) slant its news coverage in that candidate's favor and (b) editorially ignore or criticize another candidate's entry into the race.
Byerly's observation that "a small, elite group" of "key editors and a senior reporter or two" decides how politics is covered is true but trite. Such decisions indeed are made by editors and reporters hired to do so and not, say, by phone polling or daily plebiscites.
But at this newspaper and most others with which I'm familiar, news people and opinion people don't normally do their elite meeting together. Editorial opinion-forming is kept strictly separate from news reporting and editing.
Moreover, Byerly apparently is unaware that the news editors' decisions are usually a matter of applying the case at hand against external norms which are believed, correctly or not, to signal the relative importance of a story and its interest to readers. Granted, we of the editorial-page elites have more leeway than the newsies.
Those criteria are changing, sometimes in ways I think are mistaken. But from my perspective outside the news loop, it wasn't hard to spot several criteria, all traditional, that came into play in the news treatment of the Goode story.
Goode's entry into the race got a lot of ink, I would imagine, because he's from this neck of the woods (Clute is from Richmond); because his proven vote-getting ability as a state senator gives his U.S. Senate candidacy immediate credibility (Clute has never held elective office); and because he's something of a character who makes good copy (Clute is, well, earnest).
But above all, Goode got ink because the story was new, hence news. A week earlier, who woulda thunk it?
Clute, by contrast, has been plugging away for months. She got her initial stories long ago. But since then, her name in the news columns has been generally relegated to "also in the race" status in paragraphs near the end of stories about Robb's latest gaffe or North's latest outrageousness.
Given the political temper of the times, near the end of the story maybe isn't such an unprofitable place for Clute's name to be. This seems, at any rate, to be her strategy: What Byerly calls a "tireless, intelligent campaign" that's "mak[ing] its way methodically into Virginia's communities" might as accurately be described as a ho-hum yawn guaranteed to attract little attention from the media.
Partly with the potential for Election Day surprises in mind, we've resisted in Opinion page editorials the temptation to write off Clute's campaign as a hopeless cause.
Our reviews: "a refreshing addition to the political lineup" (Nov. 23); "serious if little-known" (Jan. 14); "a principled liberal" (Feb. 3); "a fresh and excellent candidate" (March 12). And "a worthy candidate in her own right" - on March 25, in the same editorial of which Byerly is so critical.
That editorial, by the way (and contrary to Byerly's assertion), hardly praised Goode's legislative support for smokers' rights and parental notification of abortions involving minors, and against gun control and the Equal Rights Amendment. It noted those positions, and opined that they might not play as well for Goode statewide as they have in his home district.
Besides, legislative voting records aren't really what this primary is about, now are they? After all, it isn't what he's done on the Senate floor that has landed Robb in the political soup.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB