Carolina media failed the people

There are 22 daily newspapers, 36 television stations, 19 weeklies and numerous other news outlets in the state of South Carolina, but not one of them informed voters that a candidate for the U.S. Senate had been kicked out of the Army and the Air Force and was arrested for showing pornography to a young woman until after that candidate had resoundingly won the Democratic primary. This is not considered timely reporting.

Alvin Greene, the candidate no one covered, defeated Vic Rawl, a well-financed candidate who had campaigned across the state without getting much media attention, either. South Carolina primary coverage was mostly devoted to the gubernatorial contest and the sexual misconduct charges lodged against Nikki Haley, who is expected to win a runoff after handily beating her opponents. Greene and Rawl, vying to run against the seemingly invincible incumbent, Jim DeMint, were ignored.

Congressman James Clyburn, South Carolina’s most visible Democratic office holder and the leader of what there is of the state’s Democratic Party, thinks Greene was a Republican plant, although why the Republicans would bother isn’t clear. Clyburn based his suspicion on questions about the source of the $10,000 filing fee the unemployed Greene paid to become a candidate.

Incredibly, Clyburn maintains he didn’t know about Greene’s challenge to the favored Rawl until five days before the primary.

“Maybe I should have been imploring people to be very vigilant about this primary,†said Clyburn in the understatement of the political year. The Democratic Party’s vigilance problem contributed to the debacle but greater credit goes to the press.

Greene lives in the little town of Manning, halfway between Charleston and Columbia, the state’s largest cities and home to the biggest papers, The Post and Courier and The State, but neither paper bothered to send a reporter to inquire about the first black candidate for statewide office in South Carolina’s history.

Walter Shapiro, the veteran political columnist who has covered eight presidential campaigns for The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, USA Today and other national publications, has come to the not very startling conclusion that this might be a sign of a problem with local coverage of local campaigns this election year.

“What we are witnessing this election cycle is the slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism,†Shapiro wrote on June 11 in Politics Daily. He offered, as evidence, a South Carolina rally for gubernatorial candidate Haley that he covered “72 hours before the state’s most raucous, riveting and at times, repugnant primary.â€

At the rally, Shapiro found “one thing missing from the picturesque scene — any South Carolina newspaper, wire service, TV or radio reporters.â€

He reported the same anemic local reporting in Kentucky, where libertarian Rand Paul won a Senate primary and “virtually the only print journalists whom I encountered … were my national press pack colleagues from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico and The Atlantic Monthly.

“Newspapers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and The State, South Carolina’s largest paper, have dramatically de-emphasized in-depth candidate coverage because they are too short-handed to spare the reporters,†said Shapiro.

And lest we smugly think this sort of thing only can happen in primitive places like South Carolina, Shapiro points to coverage of Republican Scott Brown’s shocking victory in the Massachusetts special election after the death of Ted Kennedy.

He cites a Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism post-election study that determined only 6 percent of major newspaper and AP stories in the last two weeks of the general election campaign were from outside of Boston.

“Political reporters never left Boston.â€

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.