Rule on campaign trail: Do your
homework and look for what’s fresh

Posted: July 9, 2004

Walter Mears

Walter R. Mears spent most of his 45-year career with The Associated Press covering politics. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his coverage of the 1976 presidential campaign. Although he retired from the AP in 2001, Mears will be co-writing AP’s first blog at this year’s political conventions in Boston and New York. Mears, author of Deadlines Past: Forty Years of Presidential Campaigning: A Reporter’s Story, agreed to share his thoughts on covering politics with chipsquinn.org.

Some tips on political writing, with a caveat from Walter Mears: I can’t promise you that these steps will guarantee success in your political and election reporting. I can only tell you that they guided the way I did the work.

1. Homework. Before you report on a candidate or a campaign, check the record. Know the background and record of the candidate, and learn everything you can about the people running the campaign. It can help with the reporting and also with the contacts. People like it when you know who they are and what they’ve done before -- and if politicians are flatterers, they are not immune from such indirect flattery.

2. Planning. Begin with some idea of what you can accomplish in a day’s or a week’s reporting on a candidate, a subject or the situation in a city, county, district, state. Be realistic. There are too many instant experts writing about politics as though they know it all after one day’s coverage. They don’t and neither will you. So start with a game plan.

3. Issues. You will be told by readers and political critics that reporters pay too much attention to trivia and personalities and too little attention to issues. Do not spare the trivia and personalities -- they make for readable copy and are fair game. But use them to report on issues. Elections are the point at which issues are personified -- one candidate stands for lower tax rates, the other for increased services. In my experience, not many people are interested in reading about issues. Write a story about the economic position papers of those two candidates and you will be lucky to be printed, let alone read. Write about the way the tax-cut candidate is selling the idea -- and about the consequences of lowered tax collections for public services -- and you have a piece that is readable, relates to real world concerns, and will be read.

4. Impact. Do not write for other reporters. Too many political reporters write to impress their peers and other people in politics and government, by writing stories that get into the fine print of the campaign or the minor change in the candidate’s speech. Doing that may get you points at the cocktail party but it won’t register with readers. They don’t care about inside baseball. They care about political news that is interesting and meaningful. My own rule was simple: I wrote about the most interesting thing I’d learned that day. Once you’ve done the homework, if something is fresh and interesting to you, it almost certainly will be that and more to readers who haven’t studied the candidate or the campaign.

5. Background. You can make your copy stronger and more useful by writing into the flow of the day’s news the record of what’s gone before. Done right, that is an analytical touch that will not intrude on the objectivity of your reporting, but will make it more valuable to a reader. There is a precedent for almost everything that happens. That is why it is so risky -- or foolhardy -- to write that something was said or done for the first time. You’ll quickly be challenged by people with evidence that it happened before. If you have done your research and your reporting well, you also can include information on the why and how of what’s happening. That is analytical, but it, too, can be done objectively. Again, be careful. I’m not talking about what you think, but, rather what you know as a reporter, about the past as well as about today’s events. Research is reporting, too.

6. Reporting style. I never bought the notion that a reporter had to be confrontational to do the job. Hostility is not part of the job. There are a lot of lousy reporters who play it that way and not many good ones. I always found that a civil, polite question with teeth in it served me well in getting at stories. I never had any use for the question that states a premise and demands a comment from the public figure involved -- as in “Senator, don’t you think that your fundraising is a disgrace?” That’s a cheap shot, even if the guy is a crook. The clean one is to say, “Senator, according to your campaign filings you’ve raised a million dollars from donors with direct interests in the bill you just introduced. Is that appropriate?”

The Associated Press Walter Mears, chief political writer for The Associated Press, receives congratulations after being awarded the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter presidential campaign and 1976 election. Mears has covered every presidential campaign since 1960.

7. Attribution. Political reporters shouldn’t be using anonymous sources except in the rarest of situations. If the candidate has decided not to run after all and you can’t get it on the record, OK, nail it down and report it. But there are far too many political stories in which one partisan side or the other is getting a free ride from reporters who let politicians take shots and state opinions without identifying themselves. Don’t do it. Opinions and judgments from senior campaign aides or top Democrats or whatever are an abuse of sourcing. Grant anonymity only on matters of fact that can’t be nailed any other way.

8. Labels. Avoid them. Describe political figures by reporting what they do and what they stand for, not by the shorthand of labeling. Call a candidate conservative or liberal and you’ll probably get an argument -- unless the politician applies the label himself or herself. Say what it is they want to do and tell who their allies are, and you will have an objective standard a reader can judge as left or right.

9. Balance. Political reporting has to be fair and balanced or readers will reject it. In today’s environment, a good many people read or watch only what they agree with, and getting their attention onto the factual information that is the basis for reasoned judgments is an increasingly difficult task. Convince a reader that the story is accurate and fair and you have a start on that task. And keep in mind that balance is not simply a matter of having one side make a claim and letting the other side dispute it. There are facts out there to determine who is telling the truth and who isn't. The charge/denial process is a bad habit. I’ve been guilty of it myself, too often. It ignores the fact that if you average the truth with a lie, you still have a lie.  

10. TV advertising. Campaign commercials are, unhappily, one of the most important ways modern candidates get their messages to the voters -- often negative messages. You need to see the ads because the people you are writing for see them every day. Find out about them, report the cost, check the claims.

You’ve got the greatest franchise a reporter can have in a democracy. I always felt privileged to be able to write about politics and candidates to inform the people who would be choosing among them on Election Day. It is demanding work. It can be exhausting as well as exhilarating. As a political reporter you have a front-row seat at the greatest show in democracy. Enjoy it, use it well, and your copy will show it.

Until the political conventions, you can reach Walter Mears at wmears@ap.org.

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