In the news:
Originally published February 2, 2012 at 3:54 PM | Page modified February 2, 2012 at 6:01 PM
Election season: Voters beware
Political candidates cannot make journalists into surrogate campaign workers. The Mitt Romney campaign used an NBC report for its partisan purposes, and local Democratic mouthpieces got sloppy as well.
Seattle Times Editorial
VOTERS beware. Candidates will be misusing news content for their own self-serving, manipulative purposes. Two recent examples make the point on the national level and close to home.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney turned a 1997 clip of NBC "Nightly News" into an attack ad against Newt Gingrich. The sole content of the political ad is NBC anchor Tom Brokaw announcing the House Ethics Committee decision to penalize Gingrich, the House Speaker.
Candidate Romney added no commentary or value to the report. He simply used and exploited copyrighted material, and the credibility and stature of a respected journalist to impugn an opponent.
Let Romney's campaign find its own partisan surrogates to describe Gingrich's past failings.
Closer to home, a related but different issue reared its head. Democratic opponents of Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna mashed up and misquoted reporting in The Seattle Times.
Democratic operatives are entitled to their own opinions, but not the distortion of reporting by The Times. Party Chairman Dwight Pelz and spokeswoman Reesa Kossoff took McKenna to task, and out of context, on gay marriage.
Sloppy campaign work by Democrats, and other partisans, raises wholly reasonable questions about the trustworthiness of their comments, candidates and plans if they should reach office.
On the campaign trail, journalism in The Times can help tell a story, describe a need or detail hits and misses by government and candidates. Playing fast and loose with the facts is revealing in its own right.
