According to news reports, candidates in a Missouri auditor debate “question[ed] each other’s qualifications” (Kansas City Star, 9/14/18)…
A campaign for state auditor can provoke an intense, even exciting, discussion of significant issues via their cost to government. Or they can sink into boring aspects of state finance. Or politicians can try to turn debates into a circus of insults. Which campaign the voters see depends very much on which aspects news media choose to cover.
As the Green Party candidate for Missouri state auditor, I brought up in the first candidates’ debate (9/14/18) the trial of Monsanto/Bayer, which resulted in a California jury awarding groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson $289 million in July 2018. The jury determined that his terminal illness resulted from use of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.
As a Green candidate, I am very aware of environmental dangers of herbicides. I explained that the state auditor should examine how much Missouri spends purchasing Roundup for use on state parks, roadways, and lands surrounding state colleges, universities and governmental offices. After all, with over 8,000 pending lawsuits against such a widely hated agribusiness, continued use of its poisons could put state finances at high risk.
After the debate, sponsored by the Missouri Press Association, I scrutinized the subsequent articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (9/14/18), Kansas City Star (9/14/18), Columbia Daily Tribune (9/14/18), Springfield News-Leader (9/15/18) and West End World (10/3/18) . Not one of them even mentioned Roundup. So what did they cover instead?
When current Democratic auditor Nicole Galloway described herself as a “watchdog” for the people, the Republican Saundra McDowell sneered, “You’re just a dog.” That made it front and center in each of the five articles. Constitution Party candidate Jacob Luetkemeyer, Libertarian Sean O’Toole and I never impugned anyone, sticking to issues throughout the hour and a half. And none of the issues we brought up were covered afterwards.
Though most Americans want Medicare for All, TV ads by Missouri’s Democrats and Republicans focus on legislative changes that allow health insurance companies to exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions. Of course, health insurance is not the same as healthcare. So I argued that state audits should examine how many taxpayers dollars have been wasted by Missouri’s privatization of healthcare for Medicaid recipients and prisoners. In both cases, state money is devoted to providing profits and covering overhead of insurance companies. An audit would help in estimating savings with a single-payer system.
But none of the five papers mentioned anything about healthcare. Instead, they all addressed how the Democrat attacked the Republican for lying about personal finances, and the Republican describing a lawsuit against the Democrat for violating the state’s Sunshine Law. Stories also included the fascinating discussion of whether or not the Republican had lived in the state for the required 10 years.
…and “trade[d] jabs” (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 9/14/18). Whether they addressed any issues that affect the lives of the people of Missouri, meanwhile, went unreported.
What the audience responded to most strongly was my comment that they had all smoked marijuana, or knew someone who had—thus a state audit should determine how much Missouri money is wasted policing, arresting, holding, trying and hiring parole officers for continued criminalization of marijuana. That was the only time during the debate that the moderator had to instruct the audience to stop applauding.
Again, all five stories ignored a topic of clear interest to those present. In fact, the stories from across the state were so similar that they could have been written by one person, with the other four just rearranging paragraphs and rewording sentences.
Since the media were oblivious to issues that actually affect people’s lives, I wrote an op-ed and sent it to the three largest papers. Two didn’t respond; but Tod Robberson, editorial page editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote back that it was their “policy” to not run op-ed pieces by candidates. Nevertheless, he invited me to trim my piece to under 300 words and send it to him, which I promptly did. It never ran.
Then, a few days later, the same editor penned an editorial on “Choosing the Best Candidate” (9/27/18), which described the painstaking effort his staff goes through to interview candidates, how staff are verbally abused by candidates, and their internal struggles to be fair to all. He even claimed that they “bring in as many candidates as we can” to interview. What he did not say was that invitations only go to “viable” candidates—a press industry buzzword for those approved by major parties (and backed by corporate money).
Later, the Post-Dispatch (10/10/18) published its endorsement of the Democrat for a series of vacuous reasons: That candidate is a Certified Public Accountant (not required for the office), “exposes corruption” (part of the job) and applies “consistently high accountability standards” (what state auditor does not?). The endorsement bemoaned the failure of the Republican to show up for an interview (thereby admitting that the endorsement was based on a single interview), but didn’t mention the paper’s failure to invite other candidates.
The next day, I attended a forum for candidates for the US Senate from Missouri. Only Green Party candidate Jo Crain and Independent candidate Craig O’Dear showed up. In the audience, I recognized Don Corrigan, who wrote the article on the September state auditor’s debate in the West End Word. We know each other, because he has invited me multiple times to speak about environmental politics to the class on political journalism he teaches at Webster University.
Given how little interest they often show in the policies that affect the public, why do editorial boards endorse candidates? (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 9/27/18)
Afterwards, I went up to him, shook hands, and told him that “it might be difficult for you to write an article about the debate tonight.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“Because neither of the candidates berated each other; they responded to important issues; and, they are not from the moneyed parties.” I let him know that I was quite disappointed at the way he said nothing regarding three candidates when writing about the auditor’s debate.
“There just wasn’t room. I’m really sorry,” he apologized.
“‘Not room?’ Instead of going into detail about the personal attacks, you might have given one sentence to an issue brought up by each of the other candidates.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “But we need to write about what interests our readers, and they just want to know what the Democrats and Republicans say.”
Imagine that! Those who read US newspapers in 2018 apparently have no interest in Medicare for All, being poisoned by Roundup, or whether their friends and family members do jail time for smoking weed. Either local reporters think readers are on the edge of their seats waiting to hear about residency requirements for their state auditor, or they know that their editor will squash stories that give space to candidates who don’t buy expensive ads in their paper.
I just told him, “I feel the pain you endure.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “But we need to write about what interests our readers, and they just want to know what the Democrats and Republicans say.”
That pretty much says it all about the fake corporate media and the “Reality-TV” politics they’ve helped create…
Although I’d change “readers” to “Advertisers and Owners”
Everyone needs to reread Fahrenheit 451—–because we are definitely living there now. I wonder when the book burning will start—- Or—-possibly with so many wars going on, is anyone winning anything—or is it just the military industrial complex? People really do want to KNOW what is going on——-but it seems in many news outlets that feeling good about self or country seems to rule. FACTS appear to be subversive things now ,and as facts die, so does the nation.
Democracy DOA in their darkness
I feel like this is always relevent, i’ve posted this a few times. I dont intend to spam this. It just needs o be part of the discussion: Each new insight to the incompitence of our individual political actors is to trees as the structural issues with our political system is to the forest. It is important to be aware of the flaws, but if we know it’s broken then there is no use in another political train wreck story. W e need to focus on solutions. The recurrent single solution or stratedgy is to raise our voices and raise money and hopefully some legislator will decriminalize weed or hold police accountable or bring coorporate thieves to justice or examine the backlog of rape kits or…. and on and on and on. If every single american dedicated themselves to one issue then another then another and so on our political actors would still create mess after mess; the best we can hope for is some oroboros situation. Also, each issue is devisive. if a group focuses on one cause that is less energy on another cause; and there are so many.
There is a bottle neck. The amount of shouting, pleading and .. begging all stops at the feet of our rulers. Our rulers, the legiclature, the house and Senate have a lower approval rating than Trump.
Far from making a case for direct democracy, we are all too afraid of each other for that. Direct democracy would be 350 million people voting on each bill; by the way the roman republic did that during its healthiest hundred or so years and it would be a difficult case to label rome as a direct democracy. in a direct democracy 350 million people would vote on whether we go to war, at the birth of this country something like 50,000 people had one national legislator, now in Japan there are about 200,000 voters for each legislator and here we have 535 national legislators deciding on the laws that govern 350 million people. going back to rome, without the public refendum, they still had a ratio of 100 senators (plus consuls, proconsuls, tribunes etc) for a million people. That’s 7 times more legislators than we.
There is no way that any one polititian can be accountable to 700,000 people. Maybe they arent evil sociopaths, but just opportunists with way too much on their plates. They dont even read the laws they pass. Thier staff cant meet the demands required of their office and the lobyistsare an extension of that problem.
Maybe the solution is a bit counter intuitive, the solution to fix these incompetent political actors is to have more of them. Similar to our failing social systems, as an analogy, the reason schools and infrastructure is failing is because there isnt enough. in 1913, i beleive the number of representatives was frozen at 435. there is nothing special about that number. it wasnt in the constitution. prior to 1913, the number of reps increased every ten years, with the census. maybe we should just get rid of the law that froze the number of reps.
with 100k people per rep each cinstituents voice will be 7 times louder. with 50k people per rep it would be 14 times louder. that 14 times more power. 14 times more effectiveness. 14 times more progress. I hope someone reads this, adds to it, agrees or not. or takes something
It appears that the reporting is a rigged game to the effect that people aren’t given important policy information or diverse opinions. Another nail in the coffin of democracy.
Good article. It reminds me of an old sales-saying that you ‘sell the sizzle not the steak’. Focus on the emotional hooks (ie; sex, violence, corruption, verbal conflict/playground arguments, etc) and — IF at-all — give passing note to substantial issues, just to maintain a facade of journalism. Sure you lose ‘serious issue-oriented’ readers/viewers, but that demographic (sadly-small as it is) is NOT the one that the advertisers in your paper/website are interested-in — they WANT the emotional, easily-distracted reader since those are a better sales probability. And, as is also often pointed-out by FAIR and others, this approach avoids potential conflict with TPTB, especially in this Republican oriented electorate (they have a majority of governorships, legislatures, US Senate, USHRep, and Presidency) which could result in flak from right-wing radio/website aficionados, plus lack of access to those officeholders.
To me, reading/watching the MSM to find-out some semi-objective info about significant events (especially international ones) is like reading the sales flyers from stores to find-out objective info about the products. You may learn 30% or 40% or even 50% of the story, but you won’t learn all the relevant facts, AND the info that IS presented is done-so in a selective, skewed manner. Also, you will learn NOTHING about items that the stores don’t carry.
FAIR, I love you but I’m confused by this essay. It is apparently written by the Green Party candidate for auditor, but nowhere does her name appear. Instead there is credit given to Don Fitz writing a “guest perspective”. Immediately under the photos of the two candidates is “by Jason Hancock” so that head was lifted from the article Hancock wrote for his paper. Only by careful inspection down in the article was I able to even identify the two women when I came across this: “When current Democratic auditor Nicole Galloway described herself as a “watchdog” for the people, the Republican Saundra McDowell sneered, ‘You’re just a dog.’ ”
Why make it so hard to know who the person is that is writing the article? It clearly isn’t Don Fitz
CB -Yes, it’s somewhat ambiguous at first glance, and I had to look at it a couple of times, but then you can see at the very top, directly beneath the header “Restricting Election Reporting to Issues That Don’t Matter” it says “A guest perspective DON FITZ”, and then at the bottom just above where the COMMENTS start, it has a brief political biography of Don Fitz, so that’s how you know he wrote it. But yeah, the quotations within quoted articles gets a bit confusing.
Thanks for this timely article. Media bias is at the heart of our sick democracy. The entrenched interests know that if they can control media, their real failures will never be published by the voters. We need to develop our own media independent of the corporate propaganda houses.
Terrifying example of obfuscation by mass media.