It’s getting down to the bitter end of the election cycle. Put the accent on the word “bitter.”
As someone who’s been writing about local political races since 1982, I’ve come to expect angry calls and emails about coverage — or lack thereof — from people who are very invested in an issue or candidate. But when you strip out the nastiness, some of their questions are legitimate. I thought I would share the answers with you.
The first question revolves around how we decide which candidate appearances to cover. Specifically, a reader asked why we didn’t cover a rally 3rd Congressional District Republican candidate Joe Kent held Monday night, where Tulsi Gabbard, a former congresswoman from Hawaii who is a celebrity in conservative politics, spoke on his behalf.
There are a couple of ways to answer this question. First of all, we want to devote our limited resources to telling people about where candidates stand on important issues. This was a pep rally. Second, fairness. We did not cover similar rallies on behalf of Kent’s Democratic opponent, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Third, it was at a bad time — 6 p.m. — so the story would have been too late to make our print edition.
But I agree readers are interested in reading about how politicians are campaigning. So we decided to cover Kent and Perez, along with some other candidates, as they spoke to Columbia River High School students on Tuesday and Wednesday. We were able to get a flavor of both campaigns, photograph the candidates and provide a unique angle — what young, new voters and teens on the cusp of becoming voters are thinking about this year’s campaigns and candidates.
Feeding the Beast
A second question arose over the publication of a story on a left-leaning news website called The Daily Beast. According to a story published last weekend, an exhaustive search of public records failed to turn up any evidence that the telecommunications consulting company Kent claims pays him $10,000 in salary per month exists, or has ever existed.
That’s a scoop. So where was our story? But it wouldn’t be prudent just to parrot some website’s story without checking it out. That ended up taking a couple of days, with the results appearing in our Thursday paper.
Although it still seems strange to me, it turns out Kent misstated his employer’s name on his Federal Elections Commission paperwork. The company apparently has changed its name at least once, and operates under slightly different names in different states. It’s more than I want to rehash here, but if you missed the story it’s on our website.
Watch your language
What’s the difference between offensive language, respectful language, and over-the-top, ridiculously “woke” language? Leonard Pitts, the syndicated opinion columnist for the Miami Herald, tried to answer that question in a column we published on our Friday editorial page.
Pitts used some words that caught the eye of our editorial page editor, Greg Jayne. “It contains some sensitive language — or at least language that is outdated by our standards — so I want to run it past you first,” he wrote me. “I don’t have a problem with it in the context it’s presented; but his distributor included a warning at the top, so I’d rather be cautious.”
My response: “I like the column, and I don’t think you can remove the language without undermining the central point. So our choice is to run the column with the language, or choose a different column. It’s interesting that the column is from a Black man who often writes from a liberal perspective … would we run this if it was written by (white conservative syndicated columnist) Jay Ambrose?
“If your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I say run the column.”
So, we went with it.
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