Posted on: Sunday, November 14, 2004
AFTER DEADLINE
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By Saundra Keyes
Advertiser Editor
We started this column almost four years ago to give you a backstage view of our decision-making.
As I wrote then, our goal is not to persuade you that our news judgments are perfect, but rather, to explain the factors that shape them.
The end of election season seems a good time to do that.
Campaign coverage always generates complaints and questions, many of which my colleagues and I have discussed with readers. We've also conducted our usual post-election analysis of what worked well in our coverage, and what we'll do differently next time.
Here are some of our conclusions.
We're proud of our overall coverage and of our efforts to let candidates speak directly to readers, especially through the voters' guide we published in print and on our Web site.
We're pleased with the candidate profiles and issue-oriented stories we reported and the commentary we offered on our letters and opinion pages. The combination gave readers basic information and diverging views about complex topics.
We have mixed opinions on the value of horse-race polling; some of us feel it's better left to the candidates and others believe that you expect it of us and we should deliver. But we all valued the insights our polls provided on voters' opinions about a variety of issues.
In hindsight, we wish we had devoted more time to the barrage of hit-piece mailings in several districts. Such reporting is labor-intensive, because those mailings often contain facts that are correct in isolation but do not support the conclusions asserted.
Sorting that out point by point takes reporters away from other election stories, but we think that trade-off will be essential in future campaign seasons.
A trickier issue is how — or whether — to address the type of Internet attack that surfaced in this election, with mayoral candidate Duke Bainum's wife as its subject.
We elected not to report on the attack. Other mainstream print and broadcast organizations in town made the same decision.
Columnist Dave Shapiro argued in this space last week that dubious online information needs the same scrutiny as other material, and that by ignoring what people are talking about around the water cooler, we move toward irrelevance.
I disagree, but I'm sure we're not the only news organization that wrestled with the question of how to deal with the Internet attack, or that had varied staff opinions on the issue.
A few readers contacted us to ask why we weren't writing about the Web piece on Jennifer Bainum's role in an inheritance dispute.
While there were hints of an interest in discrediting Duke Bainum, or alternatively, in suggesting without proof that his opponent was responsible for the Internet attack, the majority of callers seemed only to want assurance that we had looked into the allegations.
Conversations with such readers prompted me to draft an "After Deadline" column explaining that our reporter had checked the story out and found it didn't meet our publication standards.
However, when senior editors and I discussed the draft column, we concluded that its effect would be to further spread information we did not consider newsworthy.
In contrast to hit-piece mailings that at least purport to address candidates' records and positions on the issues, the Internet attack concerned a candidate's wife. Interesting for water-cooler gossip, yes. Of substance in a campaign, no.
The column, therefore, came across as an attempt to wash our hands of a smear while suggesting that readers could find some dirt if they knew how to Google. We decided not to run it.
In the end, our decision centered on this:
We checked out information and determined it did not meet our publication standards. Should the fact that someone else, with different standards, posted something online force us to abandon our own sense of fairness and ethics?
Our answer was no.
Saundra Keyes is editor of The Honolulu Advertiser. Reach her at skeyes@honoluluadvertiser.com or at 525-8080.
