New ways to news coverage

FOUR years ago when George W. Bush was re-elected president, there was no YouTube and MySpace was a mere one-year-old.

Those were innocent days of yore when the morning ritual is a mug of coffee with the newspaper.

The caffeine has endured but, in the race to the White House now, it is a different ball game for the newspapers.

Gone were the days when the front page of The New York Times (NYT) would grab people by the collar for three days, said Jim VandeHei, a co-founder of political news site Politico.

“Conse­quential journalism isn’t what it used to be,” he said.

The Politico itself is a testament of how the way things are now. It was started in January last year by a team of newsmen from publications such as The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and Time.

With almost four million visitors a month, it has become what the NYT described as essential reading in Washington.

“Extraordinary influential,” said CNN anchor Campbell Brown.

At a TimeWarner Summit on “Politics 2008” in New York City co-hosted by Time and CNN, VandeHei explained that readers now processed news differently.

“Journalism isn’t about writing a number of paragraphs and giving the background. People want info; and now, anybody can drive the news, not just the big cable or networks,” he noted.

The focus, he said, was in getting the news out in “real” time.

This meant that reporters could build up their own signature. Viewers would say “I want to watch ABC to see what Mark Halperin has to say.” (Halperin, who is Time senior political analyst, appears on ABC as commentator).

As Time managing editor Richard Stengel put it: “Halperin’s blog €“ “The Page” €“ has become an indispensable, 24/7 bookmark for the people.”

Blogging, Stengel said, was democratic.

“It involves people who are otherwise not involved,” he said

These days, every American voter had almost same access as the journalist. he said, adding that consumption habits have altered.

“A news posting at 3am could elicit 50 responses within minutes,” said VandeHei. There is no longer such a thing called news cycle.

“News psycho” was more like it, as someone joked.

WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan pointed how fragmented things were now.

“We are niched to death,” said Noonan.

“I miss the old, boring ways. Now, you can get your own blog and create your own reality.”

All these up-to-the-minute news, however, raises other questions.

“I wonder what it has done to political discourse; our cycles are so short now,” Stengel said.

And the viral lies, too, which spreads around without verification.

Citing an example, Brown said she was astonished that people still believed Barack Obama was a Muslim.

Why then, Brown asked, had the mainstream media become such a dirty word in this political campaign?

VandeHei felt that the media must “pull back the curtain to show how we do the things we do. The media has to become more transparent.”

As for Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter, he said the media should strive for the truth, not so much about providing balanced coverage.

“The way this country is set up is that you always have to give equal time and weight to every opinion; example, even when someone says there is no global warming,” he said.

Forget, too, about separating reporting and commenting.

“Those days are behind us,” said VandeHei.

“Why are political reporters so interesting when you talk to them over a beer, but so boring when you read them?” he asked.

“People want to know what political reporters are thinking.”

Mark Penn, who was senior

strategist for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, pointed out that more than ever the credibility of the media continued to slide.

“Clinton has often been told to let her hair down. But she always had to be careful as things tend to get blown off. If she tells a joke, there will be 10 psychologists analysing what she meant,” he said.

“She couldn’t even make a joke.”

What then, he asked, was the role of the press? To him, the media would merely go after the news of the day.

As CNN senior political correspon­dent Candy Crowley pointed out, the press had not scrutinised Obama’s record as a community leader.

“Do any of us know what exactly he did as a community organiser? He is running on that,” she said.

“What had been his accomplishments?”

There is, unfortunately, a standardisation of coverage where the same news angle got repeated countlessly (think of the stories about Republican vice-president nominee Sarah Palin tripping at her TV interviews).

“Look at newspapers, news sites and cable €“ people are talking about the same thing,” VandeHei said.

This is a YouTube election, no doubt. Barack Obama’s 37-minute speech on race in March has been viewed five million times, making it among the most-watched political videos ever.

Yes, the game has changed but it also means a golden age is here for the media. A more niched audience could mean greater chance of success.

With such a huge consumption of news, “the question is: how do you monetise it?” said Stengel.

As Carter pointed out, people do not want to read 1,000 words on their BlackBerry. They want to look as beautiful pictures, too.

CNN/US president Jonathan Klein said that when the Internet expanded 10 years ago, people thought that would be a major threat to CNN. But cnn.com had remained a top news site, he noted.

The point was to live up to be a trusted name whether online or TV, he said.

“You have to be a brand with reputation,” he added.

Breaking stories is something of a “can’t do without it” for the people, he said.

The funny side of presidential elections

THE hottest name in politics now is a comedian. That’s Tina Fey, whose impersonation of Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin is a must-watch for anyone looking for a laugh in these tough days when credit is drying up.

Fey’s name cropped up everywhere, from casual conversations to no-nonsense events such as “Politics 2008”, a TimeWarner summit co-hosted by Time and CNN earlier this week.

The Emmy Award-winning star is the latest example of the great marriage between politics and pop culture in America.

Even a video featuring Paris Hilton calling John McCain a “white hair dude” has been viewed 7.8 million times since it first appeared two months ago on www.funnyordie.com.

That’s a comedy video website which approached Hilton to respond to the Republican presidential contender who earlier ran a campaign advertisement calling Barack Obama a megacelebrity and equating him to the likes of Hilton and Britney Spears.

Politics is serious business but humour is always a winner.

A “campaign ad” on www.bigfootnessie08.com suggested Bigfoot or Nessie for president.

“Tired of the same old attacks? The same old politics? It’s time for a change,” said the voice-over, recommending “Bigfoot. He’s eight feet tall and hairy.”

Going by its rationale, big steps require big feet and Bigfoot gets entirely what is ailing America now.

Last year’s much-talked about video was the Obama Girl, a creation of Barely Political.com about a sexy, young woman declaring her affection for the Democratic candidate.

“Our debut video, Crush on Obama, was named one of 2007’s 10 best videos by Newsweek, People Magazine, the AP and YouTube,” the site declared.

Besides Obama Girl, most Americans seem to be favouring the Illinois senator currently as he is leading in the polls with just 17 days left in the countdown to Election Day. Still, that does not really translate to joy and laughter yet for the cautious Obama supporters, especially those who are anxious about “the Bradley effect”.

That refers to Tom Bradley, the African American mayor of Los Angeles who lost the race for California governor in 1982 despite poll numbers stating that he would win handsomely.

For a more recent example, think Democratic’s John Kerry, who everyone thought would be hailed the new commander in chief in the last presidential battle in 2004.

“No one knows who is going to win this election,” wrote The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on Tuesday.

The media, he scoffed, were too taken up by “wildly proliferating polling data that tell us basically nothing.”

Or, as Burson-Mars­tel­ler worldwide president Mark J. Penn put it: The press is so caught up covering the polls and not the policies.

“All this comes down to what the role of the press is?” he asked at the “Politics 2008” summit.

Penn, who was also the senior strategist for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, remarked that the press was merely focussed on “what the story of the day is.”

Presidential debates have not been much helpful, either, in providing Americans a better picture of the candidates especially their economic plans.

“The debates have been completely uninformative events,” said David H. Resler, chief economist at Nomura Securities International. Both candidates, he felt, had squandered away chances to explain to Americans about the economic meltdown, “about what’s going on, and how we got here.”

“Neither of them had stood out,” he told a briefing at the Foreign Press Centre (FPC) in New York. In that sense, he believed, it was still a tight race.

Words don’t matter much anymore, must less from the mouths of politicians. “We should probably take with a dose of salt what the candidates are saying because it doesn’t say much about how they are going to govern later,” economist Ken Goldstein said at the FPC briefing on “Presidential Campaign: The Wall Street Perspective — McCain/Obama Economic Poli­cies”.

At the end of the day, amidst financial blues, the national conversation of the common people is: Are we going to be poor?

The economic slump and the fear of job losses have pushed out other usually hot topics. When Connecticut ruled last week that gay marriages would be allowed in that state, the news caused a ripple, not a roar.

Unless a major news event happens within the next two weeks, “all the stuff that the candidates are saying now; to the people, it’s just more talk, that’s all,” said CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin at the “Politics 2008” summit.

Swaying to the heady beat of politics

A MIDDLE-AGED man walking his Labrador near Belmont University pointed to his dog and said: “He’s for Obama, too.”

Across the street, about 20 youths cheered and whistled as they waved placards declaring “Peace, Love, No War” and “Nashville Loves Obama”.

One young woman kept twirling a hula-hoop while like-minded fans of Democratic candidate Barack Obama honked to show their support as they drove past.

Meanwhile, John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” campaign has been zooming around town the past few days.

Nashville “swayed to the beat of politics” as local paper The Tennessean described it; Music City was playing host to thousands of campaign staff and journalists who arrived for the second presidential debate on Tuesday.

Belmont University, delighted to be picked as the venue, held almost 100 forums and seminars to mark the occasion.

Two 14-year-old girls carried a sign saying they were “Future Adults for Obama”.

Asked why they supported him, Hannah Zinder ventured a tentative: “Uhh ... ermm ... because he is going to end the war?”

Music and partying aside, Nashville, with a major healthcare industry, also got down to serious business.

Experts felt that healthcare, long an expensive and complex issue in the United States, has been side-stepped somewhat amid concerns over the financial meltdown.

“Money for healthcare went out of the window last week,” said Dick Morris, a former adviser to Bill Clin-ton and now a Fox News contributor, referring to the US$700bil (RM2.4tril) bailout plan. He believed that there would always be political will for any healthcare reform, “but no financial will for it”.

“We are in for at least three or four years of recession,” he said during a panel discussion hosted by the Nashville Healthcare Council.

Healthcare, according to the panel, was going up two or three times the rate of inflation and wages. It felt both healthcare plans by McCain and Obama had their flaws, but acknowledged that no one plan was perfect.

John Podesta, who once served as chief of staff to Bill Clinton and is now president for Centre for Ame-rican Progress, noted that Obama’s idea would be very expensive to carry out and would not provide care for everyone.

“Under McCain, Americans would be at the mercy of insurance companies,” he said. “Both are not plans that can be acted upon.”

Besides the panel, almost 100 student leaders from 50 universities met for a healthcare leadership conference on Monday.

They came under the banner of SHOUTAmerica, a new non-profit, non-partisan organisation aimed at educating young Americans and promoting dialogue in a “search for sustainable solutions to the impending healthcare crisis”.

According to them, the United States would spend up to US$2.4tril on healthcare this year, and much more on food or housing.

“Between 2000 and 2007, he said, health insurance premiums rose 98%,” said its executive director Landon Gibbs.

The conference also noted that US President George W. Bush never made healthcare reform a big priority in his campaign.

According to these experts, healthcare remains the defining issue of the 2008 campaign for the White House.

The topic also came up during the presidential debate at Belmont Uni-versity, reflecting Americans’ anxiety over rising costs.

Still, they conceded that the healthcare issue was not something that could be easily fixed, unlike a mechanic in Nashville whose garage sign read: “We repair what your husband fixed.”

Bracing for worse in the US economy

THE bustling scene outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) concealed somewhat the dark mood that Wall Street is down on its knees in these days of economic turmoil.

Cameras were everywhere, mostly in the hands of tourists eager to capture the nearby huge statue of George Washington on the steps leading to Federal Hall, where he was sworn in as the first US president in 1789. The current president, however, enjoys no such popularity.

Two protesters stood next to the statue, wearing white masks and black T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Arrest Bush” and carrying signs decrying that “Greed Kills.”

It was lunch time on Wednesday and media people were all over the place, seeking interviews with Wall Street executives and the demonstrators.

“We are a group of angry people,” one of the protesters said.

Another bunch of demonstrators displayed sardonic humour, calling out: “Your house is our house. Your debts are your debts. Thank you for paying your taxes, America. There is a crisis, but trust us! Give us US$700bil (RM2.4tril) and we promise you the sky won’t fall.”

One man chipped in: “I’m just looking for a soft landing.”

Two men who carried a banner proclaiming that no planes hit the World Trade Centre tried to get a slice of the attention. They hovered around an interviewee as he spoke in front of TV cameras, but were soon shooed away by the journalist conducting the Q and A.

Most of the business-suited types declined to be interviewed. Some of them explained that their employers had forbidden them to the press.

“I am by nature an optimist, but I have to be realistic, too,” one of them said, declining to identify himself or name his work place, merely saying he works for a financial institution.

“I think we’re in for a long recession, but what do I know? I’m not an economist,” he shrugged.

The US$700bil bailout plan, to him, was a bitter pill that was essential for everybody.

“It’s mortifying and there will be side effects. There isn’t going to be sunshine after that, but there is not much of a choice for now,” he said.

He has been extra careful with his spending but the mood around him was depressing, he said, “and it’s not just Wall Street but Main Street as well.”

Even the highly regarded practice of ringing the opening and closing bell at the NYSE has been marred by the dampened mood, according to The New York Times on Wednesday, which estimated that about 100 million people would usually watch the daily tradition on TV.

Headline names such as Robert Downey Jr (“Iron Man”) rang the bell in April and Michael Phelps did the honours last month.

But now, as the report noted: “Who wants to ring in — or out — the next black day on Wall Street?”

Yet, hope floats for others such as 19-year-old Wendy Francis, a visiting Jamaican who is bullish of her chances of making New York her home.

“I’ve heard so much about the economic crisis but I hope to return and make a life of myself here, as a nurse,” she said.

A Vietnamese who runs a fruit juice stand near the NYSE seems to face no downturn in business. There was a steady flow of customers ordering smoothies from him.

“Business is so-so,” he said, then promptly declared that he had lived in Malaysia once. “I stayed at the Sungai Besi camp for four years.”

This year, Rosh Hashana (the Jewish new year) coincided with Hari Raya.

The NYT reported that some worshippers troubled by the financial crisis often came out of the synagogues during services to check their phone for messages on the latest on the market turmoil.

As for New York City Rescue Mission, which runs a soup kitchen for the poor and homeless, the non-profit organisation is keeping its fingers crossed that donations would keep flowing in.

“We are overwhelmingly funded by the private sector and individuals; 96% of our budget is from private sources, foundations and corporations while the other 4% is from government sources,” NYCRM public relations manager Joe Little said in a telephone interview.

The economic fallout, he said, had not affected them yet “although we foresee it happening in the coming months as more people get laid off.”

Since 1872, NYCRM has been offering food, shelter, clothing, counselling and spiritual hope for the needy. It has 100 beds and prepares food for 400 people daily on a US$4mil (RM14mil) annual budget.

“We have seen a multitude of ups and downs. There was the Great Depression, 911, but we have continued to serve the poor,” Little said.

Its biggest fund-raising event of the year takes places between now and next month, when people are perhaps more in a giving mood as the holiday season beckons.

“We are gritting our teeth to see how it goes,” he said.