Brian Howey: With your help, covering the ’08 campaign via YouTube

By Brian Howey

INDIANAPOLIS, IN - One of the highlights of my political life has stuck with me for more than 30 years and I’ve been thinking about it as the 2008 Indiana governor’s race begins to hit full stride.

It was my senior year of high school and my dad was the managing editor of the Peru Daily Tribune. In November 1973, my parents took me to Disney World for the Associated Press Managing Editors convention. It was an idyllic week of sun and surf and making out with an Australian foreign exchange student under the monorail.

But as the week drew to a close, helicopters flew in grid patterns over the Magical Kingdom. Snipers appeared atop the Contemporary Hotel. President Nixon was coming and we were on our own. Before a nationally televised news conference, he gave America the quote that pushed Mickey Mouse off the favorite wristwatch mantle. Nixon told us, “I’m not a crook.”

Now, that’s a great story. But what in the heck does it have to do with Gov. Mitch Daniels or the Democratic gubernatorial candidates Jill Long Thompson and Jim Schellinger?

During the convention, I befriended the sons of two other managing editors, one whose dad worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. After Nixon told us he wasn’t a crook, my new friends and I scavenged a bunch of the wire service copy that littered the bureau floor and ended up in one of their parents’ hotel room. My friend from Cleveland had to go fetch something so we cooled our heels on the balcony.

Suddenly the hotel door burst open. His parents and some colleagues and their wives entered the room. I could hear ice tumbling into glasses and drinks poured. And I heard his dad begin a rant about Ohio Gov. James Rhodes. It was Rhodes who, three years earlier, called up the National Guard and sent them to Kent State University. As Neil Young would soon lament, there was the drumbeat and shots and … “four dead in O-hi-o.”

It ignited a political firestorm. Now I heard the managing editor tell his colleagues of the coming 1974 campaign, “I’m going to put a reporter on Rhodes everywhere he goes and if he so much as spits on the sidewalk, we’re going to print it.”

My friend from Pennsylvania and I glanced at each other in the dark, until the balcony door swung open, and there stood the towering editor. He didn’t skip a beat. “Hi boys,” he said, and then moved back into the room.

We emerged, said hello and skedaddled.

So, what does this have to do with the 2008 Indiana governor’s race?

YouTube.

I recalled my Disney World adventures as I scanned some of the many political blogs on the Internet. There was a video clip of candidate Schellinger telling his “penny” story to a group of guys in a Southern Indiana parking lot. It’s a staple story of his campaign. But what caught the eye of the blogger was Schellinger’s statement that until just a few years ago, he and his wife lived “paycheck to paycheck.” Schellinger is the CEO of a big architectural firm. This Republican blogger was amused by the notion that any CEO would be living paycheck to paycheck.

We live in an era of the 24-hour news channel and the 30-second sound bite and what I call bottom line journalism. The profit motives of our bigger newspapers and TV stations prohibit them from doing what the Cleveland Plain Dealer managing editor vowed to do.

Unless Gov. Daniels is opening a new Honda plant, or participating in a debate (and, by the way, the formation of an Indiana Governor Debate Commission is a wonderful idea), the central Indiana, major news media with signal strength or circulation that reaches the majority of the state, doesn’t follow him out of Indianapolis.

That’s where citizens – particularly the ones who have digital video cameras – come in. If the governor or his Democratic challengers come to town, take your video camera along. You can post it on YouTube and send me an e-mail. Send the very newspaper you’re reading the link as well. Citizens with cameras that don’t lie can go where professional reporters cannot. There simply are not enough reporters that can reach a statewide audience.

Citizens can gather up the raw data that will help provide more coverage of our candidates. The idea here isn’t necessarily “gotcha” journalism. The idea is to extend the media’s eyes and ears to places like Badger Grove, Coal Bluff or Wakarusa (Indian for “knee deep in mud”).

Such coverage can have potent results. A video camera in a small southwestern Virginia burg in 2006 caught then-U.S. Sen. George Allen (and prospective GOP presidential candidate) in his infamous “macaca” quote that most considered a racial slur. It quickly hit YouTube where millions of people viewed it. In past years it would at best only been witnessed by a couple dozen people. Allen lost the election, tipping the U.S. Senate from Republican to Democrat.

The campaigns might flinch at the idea of citizens taping and uploading their appearances on YouTube. But their own campaigns videotape each other all the time looking for gotcha moments and propaganda.

Citizens deserve to see more and now have the power of technology to make it happen.

Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com. You can e-mail him at brianhowey@howeypolitics.com.

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