By: Barton Lorimor
The former Los Angeles Times Washington D.C. bureau chief said Monday the Internet has become a permanent refrigerator door for people to post things on.
Doyle McManus answered questions from an audience gathered in the SIUC Student Center Ballroom at a luncheon sponsored by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute. Though McManus said he expected the crowd to be more harsh on the career-long journalist and his colleagues reporting the news from Washington, most of the people that approached microphones Monday were full of questions.
McManus, now a columnist for the Times, said the media’s coverage of the 2008 presidential election is not what it should have been, but was not as shoddy as critics have illustrated.
“The usual critique for us is that we just covered the heck out of the horse race when we don’t give people enough meat and potatoes on the issues,” he said. “Look inside yourselves here. When you were watching that campaign, wasn’t it the horse race you were really fascinated by?”
That horse race included a seasoned Republican Senator, John McCain, challenge Barack Obama — the first non-white candidate of a major political party.
McManus told staff members of the Daily Egyptian later Monday afternoon that the joke around his office was that LA Times reporters were tempted to go to the Supreme Court and ask them to extend the election by a couple more months because it was a thrill ride to cover.
He said the publications coverage of the election began 21 months before Nov. 4 as candidates for the primary elections began gearing up their campaigns. In March, the Times wrote a series of “meat and potatoes” stories about the issues and what people were looking for in the next president. Yet by the time of the Democratic National Convention, McManus said his office was flooded with calls about when his paper was going to do such a story.
“Several newspapers took the work they had done on the issues … and put them in one permanent place on their web site,” he said. The LA Times was no exception, McManus said, which turned the Internet into a “permanent refrigerator” since the reporters kept posting things on the site for people to see.
William Babcock, a journalism professor of Media Ethics, asked McManus if the newspaper media, with their tighter budgets, were still focusing on ethics. In response, McManus said it does not cost the newspaper any money to follow a code of ethics, but the price tag has gone up to have correspondents in other countries.
The average costs of a one-person bureau overseas has a price tag of nearly $500,000, which is five times the cost of keeping a reporter at city hall, he said. McManus said that is why there are two American journalists currently stationed in Afghanistan even though the nation’s eye has focused on that middle eastern country and its militar efforts there.
“That concerns me more than ethics,” he said.
