By Curmudgeon
Standard-Examiner executive editor Andy Howell has some interesting comments on the election in his "Behind the Headlines" column this morning [behind the firewall]:
• We all know voter apathy. What about candidate apathy?He wonders if the abysmal turnout among voters in the primaries should be attributed not so much to voter apathy as to candidate apathy. What's he mean by that? This:
If candidates decline to outline any positions outside of the usual “I want to serve my community” statements, then it is understandable that voters would be less than enthusiastic about taking the time to vote.He's got that right. He goes on:
Some candidates seeking municipal office in the Top of Utah feel that the support of friends and family is enough to get them elected, so there is no need to take a stand on an issue and risk offending someone. Sadly, they may be right.He's got that right too. He goes on to complain about candidates giving mushball answers to questions the SE has asked them.
Right again. But the SE has to shoulder some of the blame for that. The questions the paper posed, for example, for the Ogden Council candidates to answer on camera for the SE to post are very general [I'd say mushy] questions that all but invite puffery in reply.
But then Mr. Howell goes off the rails. He notes that his reporters have attended some "Meet the Candidate" events, only to gain background for covering the election. Of these meetings, Howell says this:
However, if a fistfight breaks out, they will file a breaking news story. So far, that hasn’t happened.While I can sympathize with Mr. Howell's not wanting to fill his news columns with stories of candidates repeating campaign boilerplate at event after event --- I wouldn't either --- he conveniently forgets in his little homily this morning, the SE's reporting on the "debate" [politely so called] arranged by the manager of the tax-payer financed Channel 17 [aka The Godfrey Channel] on which nothing appears without the prior approval of the Mayor and his staff [so Mayor Godfrey's CAO, Mr. Patterson told the SE]. The questions were to be determined and asked by the host of the Mayor's own TV Show on taxpayer-financed Channel 17.
The SE did a story on several candidates refusing to take part when the Mayor's secretary summoned them to appear. [The SE has now reported several times claims by the head of Channel 17 that the Mayor's office had "nothing" to do with arranging the so-called debate, but the SE has yet to inform its readers that it was the Mayor's secretary who summoned the candidates to appear.]
The first story, which ran on the Top of Utah front page, was certainly appropriate. But then the SE ran three more stories, two on the front page, highlighting the Administration's claims that it couldn't understand why some candidates refused to take part, and repeating Channel 17's insistence that the Mayor's office had nothing to do with the debate, and reporting the Administration's offer to give the non-participants "another chance."
In short, the SE, by its coverage made the non-participants refusal to take part a campaign issue as it dutifully kept repeating the Mayor's Channel and the Administration's take on the matter. Four times.
So Mr. Howell is being disingenuous when he states now that at the recent Meet the Candidates forum for Ogden City Council, there was nothing to report, and wouldn't be, unless someone threw a punch. The news was that the candidates all appeared and took part, and that they all handled questions put to them by voters, not by a staffer of the Administration's TV channel. Having repeatedly reported the Godfrey ticket candidates' take on why their opponents did not appear at the Godfrey-arranged forum at Channel 17, the SE had an obligation to report that all the candidates did appear at the most recent one. And why.
