The dropping of the writ April 11 kicked off my third B.C. provincial election as a reporter (four if you count the HST referendum) and brought my career total to 29 elections of one sort or another: eight federal elections, plus the Charlottetown Accord referendum and the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum, four Ontario provincial elections, five Ontario and four B.C. municipal election cycles, plus two local referendums.
I’ve been part of big nationwide election night TV and radio broadcasts, and flown solo in a one-person newsroom, and two things never change: reporting an election well is a professional challenge for rookie and seasoned journalists. And, no matter how well you think you’re covering it, you will hear claims that you’re biased, lazy (not asking the “hard” or the “right” questions), doing the bidding of your corporate masters, or – new since 2016 – “fake news.”
The reality is that nearly every journalist covering this election will vote, which means at some point we’re going to make a personal decision about the candidate or party we think is going to be best for our riding and the province.
You could argue, as many people do, that because we make that decision we can’t be neutral observers. It’s difficult to argue against that, and it would be foolhardy for us to pretend we don’t have biases. It seems trite to say “trust me” when trust in my profession is fast eroding, especially where coverage of politics is concerned, but that’s what I’m going to do.
Journalists are not neutral observers, but the core of our profession is to provide neutral observations. So how do we square that circle?
The first step is to accept and understand our biases. The second is to use that understanding to practise a sort of mindfulness journalism.
We train ourselves to put a gap between our biases and our reporting, and use that gap to assess whether those biases are sneaking into our stories. Along the way we have help from editors and colleagues. I’ve never met anyone who worked in a newsroom where all the editors and reporters have identical biases (especially at NHL playoff time), so it’s an effective check-and-balance mechanism.
If readers can’t guess how I’m going to vote and if, when it’s all over, the candidates can never be sure if I voted for or against them, then I’ll have done OK.
Coast Reporter will publish four times during the campaign, which adds to the challenge of helping you get the information you’ll need to make a decision. But, we’re up to the challenge, and we’ve got a new tool – our Coast Beat podcast. We’re scheduling feature interviews with the major candidates over the next four weeks. You’ll get to hear them tackle a broad range of questions from me and editor John Gleeson.
Our first, with NDP incumbent Nicholas Simons (recorded April 10), is in the current podcast.
If you haven’t listened to our podcast before, it’s easy. You can listen directly from our website. We post a link every week when the podcast is ready. You can download and subscribe through iTunes or the Podcast app on iPhone and iPad. If you’re an Android user, Soundcloud is the app to look for (it’s downloadable for free). We also post every episode to soundcloud.com under “Coast Reporter.”
