Ray Suarez joined in October 1999 as a Washington-based senior correspondent responsible for conducting newsmaker interviews, studio discussion and debates, reporting from the field, and serving as a backup anchor. He has twenty years of wide experience in the news business, including National Public Radio, where he had been host of the call-in news program Talk of the Nation since 1993. He shared in NPRs duPont-Columbia Silver Baton Awards for on-site coverage of the first all-race elections in South Africa and for coverage of the first 100 days of the 104th Congress. His essays and criticisms have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Baltimore Sun, among other publications. [  ]

Ray Suarez

senior correspondent, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

Washington, D.C. Workshop
December 10, 1999

For the more than 20 years since I first started working in newsrooms, I have to say that there is no story Ive enjoyed more than working elections. From aldermanic races in wards that operated as little towns within the vast city of Chicago, to riding Geraldine Ferraros campaign plane, interviewing George Bush, Michael Dukakis, Pete Wilson, and Newt Gingrich... attending rallies, precinct worker trainings, going to button factories, covering court cases in disputed races... for me nothing races the blood like a good political story.

     But, Im afraid that now, at mid-career, Im working in a business that has lost a lot of its zest for covering this fascinating part of American democracy for the benefit of viewers, readers, and listeners. Consultants are telling commercial broadcasters, while their home states are in the midst of hard fought, pivotal, era-changing races, that people dont really care about campaign news, that its very hard to get them engaged at all unless they can see a compelling link between the race and their own lives. They arent interested, say the rent-a-brains of the consulting world, in the minutiae of policy-making and issue debate.

     I have been handed that kind of report by news directors as we are told at an editorial meeting that we are doing less campaign coverage in the coming cycle, only to get out on the street to find people engaged in soul-searching, arguing with neighbors about candidates, talking earnestly at church about whats coming up in the coming race.

It was a mismatch, but those people I saw out in the real world were no match for the news directors who were getting the advice they paid for, they didnt want to spend overtime money for crews, they didnt want to send people out for election-night site surveys. They didnt want to burn up valuable news time covering politics, when they could be interviewing a star from one of their own prime time programs or an in-depth report on a disease that was the focus of the movie of the week.

     For me, the cycle is clear: give people less politics, they know less about politics, they are less interested, as a result demand less politics...then report a diminished hunger to public opinion researchers, who sell their numbers to consultants, and voilà, the cycle starts over again.

     But this is an understandable outgrowth of the way that politics really has changed. The machines of the old urban centers have been destroyed, parties matter less, and the dispersal of people away from the core, historic municipality in a metropolitan are, into a spreading ocean of suburban counties, with country boards, village trustees, suburban mayors, sheriffs, prosecutors and the whole panoply of office holders have given the news business a real headache.

Forty years ago, it was clear what the Chicago Tribune would cover in an upcoming race: the mayoral primary in the Democratic Party for the city of Chicago, and the Cook County Board Presidents race, and the county commissioners race. That finite, comprehensible number of races were the ones that mattered to the lions share of the Tribunes readers, heavily concentrated in Chicago, home to two-thirds of the regions people, and heavily concentrated in the county of Cook, home to the vast majority of the regions people.

     Today the Chicago metropolitan region stretches from Kenosha, Wisconsin to Michigan City, Indiana. From Lake Michigan out to the soybean fields turned subdivisions of Kane and McHenry counties. There is no race that pulls in all those people, pulls in all the people on both sides of the Ohio River in the Cincinnati/Covington, Kentucky metro area, or all the people in the vast metropolitan area on both sides of the Mississippi River, centered on St. Louis, which constitutes a shrinking percentage of the metropolitan area.

     So, where does that leave us? First, with a harder assignment. Simply the sheer weight, the importance, the shared experience of campaigns wont be enough, since more than half of all adults simply choose not to vote, and as coverage areas become more dispersed and more diverse, its hard to know which stories to tell.

But along with the assignment being made that much harder by demographic change and social realities, we are faced with a business reality: our competitors are doing a lousy job. Because they are shedding their commitment to local political news and serious national coverage, our commercial counterparts are leaving the field open to us but also forcing us to step up to our obligationsas carriers of a public mission.

The old days of believing that our local coverage was an add-on, bringing context and perhaps more depth to stories already introduced to the public on other media those days are over. Fewer people are reading newspapers, though more of our viewers are, fewer people are sampling a variety of sources to get their news, so instead of the interesting dish that brings savor to an information smorgasbord, we in public broadcasting, in this part of the news spectrum, will in 2000 find ourselves being more like the whole meal.

     If anybodys going to hear serious give-and-take on a proposal for increased taxation for schools, its our viewers. If anybody is going to see a public forum, low on histrionics and high on content, where members of the public get to talk to local office-seekers about what they believe, its going to be on our stations. Were the people with the mission, were the content people, were the people with the reputation that implies that if we dont do it, no one else will.

     But, as I did mention earlier in this talk, it can be expensive to do it right, especially in large markets. So what are we going to do? First off, start early, and let your viewers, your university or state licensees, and politicians know youre going to start early. Set aside time in the program schedule, or do interstitial hits that run in between popular shows, about local issues, and the way national issues intersect with local concerns. There are places where affirmative action and bilingual education are tremendous local issues, and there are places totally unaffected by it. The mining law of 1872 is a big screaming deal in some places, and when I was a kid in Brooklyn we never talked about it all. National candidates have views that are going to cut one way in farm country, and another way in the central business district, and many of you have both right there in your coverage area. Create longitudinal interest, that is, interest that added content deepens over time.

If youve already got free-standing, locally produced public affairs programming (and I know that that is a big if) enlist that in your election project, make it a vehicle for your 2000 plans, since so few of our noncommercial stations actually produce local newscasts as such.

     On the commercial side, where local news is one of your only local products, the challenge is a little different. You have to make that claim early, so people dont suddenly find it a terrible imposition in June or July when you decide you want a piece of it. Executive producers are not going to say What do you mean you want five minutes every Tuesday for six months? when you are approaching election day. Starting early can make a big difference.

     Even in this post-license challenge era, Im really not sure anymore what you could possibly do to lose your license&maybe kill a foreign head of state on live TV&and even then its a close call. If its Infinity or Cap Cities they may just say its an accident, were sorry, and well put a note in our public file to the people of Britain: were sorry we killed your queen...

     But we do still operate as public entities that do want to demonstrate our commitment to the public and this is a time when that is often lacking to be able to do it in a way that covers you in glory, puts you in the line of fire for a couple of awards, gets you to come to swell hotels for free meals. Your bosses are not totally impervious to the charms of positioning. When its going to cost them big, and theyre not so sure of its success, youll have to do a little soft-soap, a little stroke, but it is not impossible. Many stations managements still want to do the right thing.

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