Journalists: It's Time To Name That Party

Thanks Don for bringing much needed attention to a problem that smacks of journalistic bias. How is it that so many stories about politicians under investigation or indicted lack basic identification of political affiliation?

Why is it so difficult for the wire services to include that basic information? Or, is it omitted in some instances and included in others? Political bias does seem to play a role here, and that's just stupid. It's also lazy and shows a level of incompetence and a failure to take the job of reporting news seriously. It's substituting opinion for responsible journalism. It's also completely inexcusable.

When politicians are being investigated, indicted, or are forced to resign, those are all events that have lead time. These are stories that build over time and the reporters who follow such stories know the facts. Adding a single line that mentions political affiliation isn't difficult. Indeed, all one has to do in many stories is simply throw the political affiliation in parenthesis following the first mention of the person involved.

The AP knew that Sharpe James (D-Newark) [ed: see how difficult that was?!] was under investigation for months and that the DA was going to be holding a presser yesterday. They had lead time to write a basic story and flesh it out with details of the indictment (number of charges, type of charges, who else was indicted along with him). Among the basic facts should be party affiliation.

That is a critical piece of information for everyone - and it doesn't matter what party you belong to or what party the individual involved belongs to. We should have a right to know up front what our politicians are doing and what political parties they belong to. Reporters should not assume that everyone knows that James is a Democrat. Someone reading about his indictment in California wouldn't know. Reporters should not be assuming that their audience knows certain pieces of information about a given case. Report them. That's your job.

It's not the reader's job to go hunting for party affiliations.

I shouldn't have to hunt around a story trying to find what party an indicted politician belongs to. As I found yesterday, some papers did a better job than others, but there's no excuse for the failure to include this information.

I try to include political affiliations for those politicians I write about, especially when those politicians are more obscure and will do what I can to include party affiliation when writing about politicians going forward when it isn't sufficiently clear.