When Good Ideas Go Wrong
How many ways are there to tell a different story of campaign politics?
I think this concept is limited only by the imaginations and initiative of journalists (also recognizing certain other constraints that can be overcome with great effort, e.g. newsroom culture, budgets, and time).
This headline in the Week in Review section of The New York Times on Sunday got me all excited: Attorneys at Politics: Would You Hire One to Represent You?
That’s a cool idea. We might actually learn something about who these candidates are as politicians by examining who they were as lawyers.
But…
Look. You can’t tackle a topic as complex as this in one article/column–and certainly not one article/column that attempts to cover most of the major candidates. All you get are amusing or horrifying vignettes that really tell you very little (while persuading you that they tell a great deal, which, BTW, is actually harmful to understanding much of anything about politics).
Here’s a good idea that could have given citizens the information they need to be free and self-governing and instead turned out doing exactly the opposite. Which, by the way, is unethical–seeing as how every code of ethics of journalism that I’ve ever read promotes the idea of journalism as the stuff that helps citizens make civic/public life work.
It would be really nice if a code of ethics were adopted by some of our local media outlets.
It seems to me that the arguments presented - though solid and representative of the way things should be - have little relevance in small markets where ethics need not apply.