COMM 209, 150: Media as government watchdog?

Now that a man accused of domestic violence has won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor, an columnist for The Aurora Beacon-News has apologized for the fact the news media hardly mentioned it before the primary election.

Charges were dropped, and the story is developing. But she may have a point ...

(And in all candor I have to add: I'm a self-confessed news junkie, and my job as a journalism teacher includes keeping on top of stories like this. But I didn't know about it either.)

Here's a link to the column by Denise Crosby of the Beacon-News at http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/beaconnews/news/crosby/2030966,2_1_AU05_DENISE_S1-100205.article. Her headline:
We're sorry: Media let voters down in lt. gov. race

Crosby begins by apologizing, a "Mea culpa."

We here in the media -- in spite of all our crusading, editorializing and watchdog reporting -- blew it big time by letting a pretty important race fall through the cracks on Tuesday.

And I'm so very sorry we did.

Scott Lee Cohen, a pawnbroker with a GED who was arrested for allegedly beating up his prostitute girlfriend a few years ago, is now sitting in the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket.

And his opponent on the Republican side? A kid from downstate who is named Jason because, of course, he's under the age of 30.

She adds:

I suppose we can point the finger at voters who went to the ballots and checked off Cohen's name simply because they repeatedly heard it touting job fairs on reality show commercials. We can even throw the dunce hat on his opponents who didn't do their homework and blast this guy's credentials to smithereens.

But the blame also has to point back at us. We in the media, after all, are staking our future on that noble mission of providing readers all the information they must have to make wise and informed decisions.

Scott Cohen, I'm thinking, does not reflect a wise and informed decision.

In fairness, Crosby notes that the Chicago Sun-Times mentioned Cohen's past but kind of blew it off. The rest of us, she says, didn't even do that much:

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown admits he knew about at least some of Cohen's past because the candidate voluntarily disclosed the arrest in an interview. But Brown cast him off as a nut case with little chance of winning, then buried the really juicy stuff deep in the story.

And we media-types in the 'burbs didn't write boo about the guy -- or Plummer, either -- because we were too busy focusing on the governor's race, as well as some interesting local battles.

Nobody cared. Nobody paid attention.

Same thing downstate.

For his part, Brown acknowledged in his column in the Sun-Times at http://www.suntimes.com/news/brown/2029178,CST-NWS-brown04.article he could have handled the story better:

Let the record reflect that on the very day last March that Scott Lee Cohen announced his campaign for lieutenant governor of Illinois, he voluntarily disclosed he had once been arrested in what he described as a domestic battery case involving a live-in girlfriend.

It seems only fair to point that out now that Cohen is the surprise winner of the Democratic primary -- and everybody is suddenly digging into his background and trying to figure out who he is -- beyond that carefully crafted image as "the only candidate who is doing something about the economy."

The problem for Cohen was that he made his announcement to me, and I wasn't taking him very seriously.

Give Brown credit for writing about his role in the debacle at all. He doesn't really explain his motives, but he says:

How was I to know way back then that the Democratic voters of Illinois would be so dumb as to elect him, brainwashed by millions of dollars in advertising about his job fairs?

That's why I told Cohen at the time that nobody even knew who he was, let alone cared enough to want to read about his dirty laundry, and I didn't see the need to go into it.

I was only writing about him because of Cohen's line of work: pawnbroker. I'd never heard of a pawnbroker trying to break into politics, let alone aspiring to being a heartbeat from the governor's office.

But Cohen insisted he thought it was important to make the incident public right from the start, because he didn't want it to come up later and look like he was hiding something, a la Blair Hull or Jack Ryan.

So I duly reported the information, along with his explanation that the charges were dropped when the girlfriend failed to appear in court and with his denial that he'd done anything wrong in the first place. The whole business was tucked into a couple of paragraphs deep within the story, which I thought portrayed Cohen overall as a bit of a goof.

I can understand that. You don't have the time to write very much about every goofball who decides to run for office. It's like covering the Kentucky Derby: You concentrate on the horses that are most likely to win the race. Brown says he didn't take Cohen seriously until:

... a few weeks ago, when I started receiving calls from Democratic political types as his opponents came to realize Cohen might actually win, which I'd already figured out for myself just by hearing all his radio commercials and seeing his campaign mailings.

Some hoped I would remind voters about Cohen's arrest, but I thought that if his opponents or the candidates for governor believed it was important, they should make it an issue themselves.

Instead, I wrote a column about the very real possibility Cohen could win and pointing out how he was going out of his way to hide his occupation in those campaign ads touting him generically as a successful small-business man.

I hoped that would be enough to bring voters to their senses, which was my second mistake.

There's plenty of blame to go around here. And both Cohen and Brown deserve credit for going public about their mistakes when they might have chosen to remain silent.

But at least to me, it points up the drawback of "horserace" coverage that doesn't inform the voters about their choices in an election.