PJNet

Butch Ward, in a Poynter online column, looks at the last 10 months of primary coverage, and based on the storylines below asked: Where was the journalism? The storylines include:

• McCain’s campaign is doomed.
• Clinton’s nomination is inevitable.
• Obama is too effete and inexperienced to win.
• Giuliani is running surprisingly strong.
• Huckabee has no shot.

He adds:

Watching the cable channels cover Tuesday night’s results, I was struck by how little anyone told me about why people in New Hampshire voted as they did. At one point, I heard the briefest of snippets on one channel that exit polls showed New Hampshire voters had been most concerned with the economy. And yes, I saw charts that told me Clinton had reclaimed much of the women’s vote she had lost to Obama in Iowa.
 
But no one was telling me why.

The argument used to be bloggers vs. journalists, now it is bloggers vs. blowhards. Here is my solution, give each of the pundits a blog, that’s it. No national pedestal unless they build one. Save the national pedestal for the real journalists who are collecting information and helping us understand the world around us.  

Update: Somehow this post crashed and most of the original disappeared and I had to rebuild it as best I could from memory.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Citizen Journalism, Restoring the Trust, Citizen journalism, Journalism, Opinion Writing, Reinventing Journalism, Uncategorized, Weblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.