Yesterday, I attended a panel on modern media coverage of politics and elections.
The three panelists included Ben Tracy, a reporter for CBS News; Bonnie Brennen, a professor of journalism at Marquette and Christopher Murray, an instructor at the Les Aspin Center.
The panelists hit on a lot of trends in journalism and politics today: the rise of social media, the increasingly bold lies of politicians, the rise of fact-checking and the surge in spending from o SuperPACs.
I thought it was interesting how Tracy said that broadcast news shouldn’t be the only source. As panelists frequently noted, the typical 22-minute broadcast is not a lot of time. Tracy argued in favor of kind of a portfolio of news, supplementing watching TV news with magazine and newspaper reading.
A lot of discussion about how you can inform the public in the “22 min.” of nightly news. #loweclass #elections
— Joseph Kvartunas (@JoeKvartunas) October 1, 2012
I think the panelists were correct to point out that those 22 minutes seem even more inadequate in light of deluge of political ads that are part of the remaining 8 minutes.
One thing they didn’t get into was whether the increased fact-checking efforts of places like Politifact and Factcheck.org offset all this spending by SuperPACs.
Personally, I don’t think they have quite caught up. I think fact-checker’s growth has been boosted by the SuperPACs. More claims to check both leads to more content and more readers.
I liked the discussion as it was wide-ranging and pertinent. Erik Ugland's moderating was well-done, as usual, and the panelists were interesting, particularly Tracy.
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