I am about to send the following letter to two local network affiliates who were at an Angelides town hall meeting this morning. I'll let the content of the letter speak for itself because I go over pretty much the entire event in the letter.
I haven't actually sent it yet, so if people have any constructive criticisms in the next hour or so I would appreciate it.
Dear Local ABC and CBS Affiliates:
This morning I attended a town hall meeting at CCSF with State Treasurer, and Democratic nominee for Governor, Phil Angelides. We were there to talk about the education system in California and his plans to reform it should he be elected Governor. He started off his speech by acknowledging that members of the press had asked him for his reaction to some comments by Arnold Schwarzenegger that had been published earlier in the LA Times. He briefly explained that he found Arnold's comments to be an embarrassment to California and unbecoming of the governor. He then quickly got back to the issues at hand, covering in detail his plans to roll back tuition hikes on the UC and CS systems, increase financial aid, and restore funding to programs for disadvantaged youth.
Then came time for questions and the audience had many. Every single audience question was pointed and policy related (though not every question was education related - a couple of questions were about health care and about the growing disparity between rich and poor). The students, faculty, and other supporters at the meeting wanted to know what Phil has done for them and what he plans to do for them once he is in office. After allowing a good long string of audience questions, Phil said he would take two questions from the press before breaking. I was extremely disappointed to find that all the press wanted to do was return to the topic of Arnold's earlier remarks. The first question (I believe from the CBS affiliate) was to ask for an elaboration on what Phil meant by "offensive". Phil clearly didn't want to dwell on the issue and neither did the audience - we can all judge the offensiveness of Arnold's remarks for ourselves. The second question (I believe from ABC) was even more ridiculous - the reporter wanted to know if Phil thought the media coverage of Arnold's remarks would be helpful to his campaign! It struck me as a self-serving and desperate plea for confirmation of the relevance of the old style media. An audience member interrupted to remind everyone that we were here to talk about EDUCATION and there were many agreeing murmurs from the other audience members. Talking to people on the way out of the room, every single person I approached agreed that the press questions were inappropriate.
Afterwards a fellow attendee and I approached the CBS reporter and expressed our disappointment. We were informed that it was "the story of the day" and how dare we question whether it was newsworthy (note: we never said it wasn't newsworthy - just that we found their line of questioning inappropriate). Also, he claimed the coverage would help Angelides so why was I making a big deal out of it? (We tried to approach the ABC reporter as well but he did not have time for us).
As to Arnold's actual quote, I found it moderately offensive, not earth shattering, certainly not MY idea of "story of the day" material - worth maybe 2 minutes of air time, if that. But beyond that I have to question the entire concept of a "story of the day". Having every network covering the same "story of the day" leads only to each network trying to find a tiny edge over the others by adding a slightly different twist and hounding the subjects of said story for quotes that make slightly better sound bites. I don't believe it makes for good television and it certainly doesn't make for good news coverage. If local news coverage were of higher quality more people would get their news there instead of turning to alternate sources such as the internet.
I know I speak for a large number of people when I say that I wish we could put some real content back into the news coverage of politics. Every person who spoke up at the town hall this morning (and probably most of the people who did not) was there because we wanted real information about Phil's policy ideas so that we can compare the candidates on their merits rather than on which one makes the fewest embarrassing statements on camera. While coverage of Arnold's remarks may help Phil in the short run, in the long run I believe it hurts California because it cheapens the political discourse. And certainly having reporters hounding Phil for better sound bites distracted from the real purpose of this morning's meeting - to talk about California's education system. I believe it was irresponsible of those reporters to hijack the event like that and I would hope for better behavior in the future.
Sincerely,
[me]