In politics, you’re either on message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… On the Beat.
A recent study done by the Pew Research Center caught my attention. It looked at the evolution of the way media covers state politics – specifically, the number of reporters who are on the beat at State Capitols across the country.
Across the U.S. the overall number of journalists covering state legislatures and the governor’s office has increased by eleven percent while the number of full-time reporters decreased by half.
Here in Utah, the numbers are a little bit different.
This was interesting to me because the Pew study compares today to 2014, which is when I was working as Governor Gary Herbert’s spokesman, interacting with the media every single day.
Back then, there were 27 journalists who covered Utah politics, including 13 who did it full-time. Today, the overall number is significantly higher with 41 journalists covering Capitol Hill in some capacity with 14 working the beat full-time, 24 covering it part-time and three in the “other” category, classified as interns or student journalists.
So, while the number of full-time statehouse reporters had dropped significantly across the country, Utah has actually added one to the total, though the overall percentage of the total press corp. that is full-time has decreased.
More reporters covering local politics has its benefits and drawbacks for politicians and for reporters themselves. As the media landscape has evolved, there are more outlets – not just more reporters at the same four TV stations and two newspapers. Blogs, websites and even podcasters all are part of the coverage and that splits the audience. As a result, more voices are competing for your attention and your trust and that leads to smaller audiences for each (at least in theory). That’s good because one outlet doesn’t have outsized influence on what people think, but it is also more challenging to relay accurate information to the public.
From a spokesman’s perspective, more reporters means more demand for answers and that can get complicated, especially if they are all working on different topics on the same day.
It’s also worth mentioning more reporters and more coverage isn’t the same thing as better coverage. Reporters with less experience can be a challenge for politicians and their communication teams because they can focus on getting the facts of a story right but miss the larger, historical context. That puts more pressure on the source to provide that background information and help frame a story accurately.
Institutional knowledge is important and it comes with time and experience.
When I was the governor’s spokesman, I worked with a great press corp. that included Rod Decker, Lisa Riley Roche, Robert Gehrke, and Rich Piatt. I also worked with some folks still working the hill like Ben Winslow, Glenn Mills more.
And although it is, by nature, an adversarial relationship, it’s also important to build a level of trust between a spokesperson and reporters. You won’t always like their coverage and they won’t always like your answers (or non-answers), but the media plays an essential role in our society and having more of them reporting on the policies and politics of Capitol Hill is a good thing.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
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