Let's admit it. This has been one dreary election. Even here at the magazine, where we take the long view, we're feeling out of sorts, a bit off-kilter.
The fiscal machinery of state is in disrepair, and most likely dated, yet candidates aren't disposed to offer much beyond tinkering with a few of the gears. Indictments fall like a hard rain, yet politicians suggest little more than a short dash for ethical cover.
Who, we wonder, has enough moxie to get us back on track, or enough vision to point the way.
Are there any political contenders? In this issue, which you'll likely read after Election Day, we question why anyone would want to run for office. As the campaign season staggered to a close, we encouraged political scientist Chris Mooney to consider this. You'll see he accepted the assignment in good spirit.
"Why do they do it?" he asks. "And more important, has this job become so onerous that it threatens the quality of American governance by biasing the type of people willing to serve?" The questions are important, he concludes, but the answers "are not reassuring."
Yet Mooney manages some sympathy for the "stuff" politicians have to put up with just to get and keep their jobs.
Could such pundits point the way? Bethany Carson spoke with some of the folks you see quoted most often in political stories, and she discovered they share a couple of key traits: passion about their professional purpose and perspective on their personal role.
Political scientist Kent Redfield said, "It's taking my expertise and making a contribution to public knowledge and public debates." Then Carson notes his second thought: "That sounds so terribly pompous. I can't believe I just said that."
Similar humility in the political arena could be good.
The so-called talking heads share another characteristic: an understanding of and appreciation for the needs of the media. Good political pundits, Carson concludes, have much in common with the political scribes they aim to help.
How about journalists, then? Do they have moxie and vision when writing about the machinery of government or, for that matter, the state of the emperor's clothes? The best of them do.
This month, we'll mention three. On November 13, Kathleen Best, now an assistant managing editor of The Sun in Baltimore, and Bill Lambrecht, now Washington bureau chief for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, will become the first inductees in The Bill Miller Public Affairs Reporting Hall of Fame. And in September, Charles N. Wheeler III, director of that program at the University of Illinois at Springfield, was inducted into the Lincoln League of Journalists of the Illinois Associated Press Editors Association.
We're proud to note that, over the years, these journalists have lent their talents to Illinois Issues.
Best is assistant managing editor for Sunday, national and foreign news at The Sun. She accepted that assignment last year after more than a quarter of a century in journalism, much of it spent dogging Illinois politicians for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
While in the Illinois Press Room, Best earned a reputation as a smart reporter with an analytical frame of mind, as a deceptively gentle but incisive interviewer and as a graceful writer who served her readers complex policy with a dash of political intrigue.
She also has worked for the Quad City Times in Davenport, Iowa, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Her first year at The Sun, she helped shape coverage of issues surrounding the war in Iraq, the succession battles on the U.S. Supreme Court and the controversies over warrantless wiretaps.
Lambrecht, a national correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for some 20 years, has covered politics and the environment since 1973, starting with his stint as an intern in the Illinois Statehouse with the first PAR class. He has been on the campaign trail for every presidential election since 1984. But Lambrecht's passion is covering the environment, including the politics of water and the global impact of biotechnology.
He wrote his first newspaper series on genetically engineered food in 1986. And he has traveled to 12 countries, including India, while reporting on the global uprising over the arrival of genetically modified crops. He wrote a book on the subject, Dinner at the New Gene Café, and he has written about it for Illinois Issues.
Lambrecht and Best will be inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Inn at 835 in Springfield. Call 217-206-6084 for more information.
Longtime Illinois Issues columnist Charlie Wheeler is an award-winner, too. He's a pundit and journalism professor now, but he spent 24 years with the Chicago Sun-Times, 19 of them in the Statehouse. He became the seventh member of the Lincoln League of Journalists, which was created in 2000 to honor "men and women who have provided exemplary service to other journalists and to daily newspapers published in Illinois."
Wheeler began writing a monthly column for Illinois Issues in 1984 and has been at it ever since. We once wrote that he is to us what David Broder is to The Washington Post: "thoughtful, respectful, compassionate — and passionate about dissecting the difficult topics of the day."
Wheeler is training tomorrow's scribes, while Redfield and Mooney are training tomorrow's pundits — and perhaps tomorrow's political contenders.
So if this election got you down, maybe the future won't be quite so dreary. In Illinois, to crib a saying from sports, there's always the next election.
Don't blink
TV news devotes seconds to politics, a new study shows
In the month after Labor Day, prime time for campaign news coverage, television news broadcasters in each of two key Illinois markets devoted less than 30 seconds in typical 30-minute newscasts to reporting on the election, according to findings compiled by the Midwest News Index, a project of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's NewsLab. The findings show that Chicago viewers got 29 seconds of election coverage in a typical newscast, while Springfield viewers got 21 seconds. The average in nine media markets located in five Midwestern states was 36 seconds. Noncampaign government news fared better, but not much. Chicagoans got 1 minute and 27 seconds. Springfieldians got 1 minute and 26 seconds. The largest proportion of air time went to advertising: 10 minutes and 26 seconds in Springfield; 9 minutes and 26 seconds in Chicago.
Beyond Illinois, NewsLab tracked broadcasts in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin between September 7 and October 6 on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX affiliates. The index analyzed the largest media market and the state capital city in each of the five states.
The pre-election report is the first in a series of analyses of local broadcast coverage of politics and government that will run through the summer of 2007. The project is funded by the Joyce Foundation of Chicago.
A recent survey commissioned by the foundation shows that local television news broadcasts are a leading source of information on government and politics: 69 percent of voters in the five-state region "regularly watch local broadcast news," while 58 percent read the newspaper, 32 percent use the Internet for news and 30 percent listen to talk radio.
The Midwest News Index findings will be continually updated on the project's Web site at www.mni.wisc.edu.
Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, November 2006
