Political reporting (II)

In the first part of this two-part series, I made the point that “despite the mutual interdependence between the politician and the reporter, both of them have different objectives or agenda” in making the news and getting the news. The reporter’s primary objective is to get and publish information he believes would help the society. […]

In the first part of this two-part series, I made the point that “despite the mutual interdependence between the politician and the reporter, both of them have different objectives or agenda” in making the news and getting the news. The reporter’s primary objective is to get and publish information he believes would help the society. On the other hand, the politician is in the primary business of marketing himself or his party to the people. The people transform into the electorate at election seasons.

It could still be argued that political reporting is not the same thing as reporting on the politician. This argument is not likely to take us far because the politician is both the face of politics as well as its custodian. He is the necessary evil in this business. It is impossible to report politics by ignoring the politician. It is he who makes the news. It is not the business of the reporter to contest this or seek to free himself from the politician as his major source of news.

There are no prescribed qualities a reporter must possess to report politics. But when an editor assigns a reporter to the political desk, he assumes the reporter sufficiently understands the language of politicians and the nuances of politics and political contests. To use a local parlance, politicians are cunny men and women. The political reporter must possess the ability to read them by employing his own degree of cunny cunny. 

Political reporting can be exhilarating. The political desk hardly experiences a news drought. It pulsates with sensational information 24/7. When the big political masquerades are not in the arena, the smaller ones are. They too are the voices and the faces of politics. Politics knows no seasons. It is there in good as well as in bad weather.

Let us look at some of the pitfalls the political reporter must observe to do a good job on the political desk.

1. The political reporter must be aware of the clear and present danger of being used as a tool by the politician without knowing it. The reporter must not allow himself to develop an unquestioning dependence on the politician. He must treat him as a source of news but must now imbue him with omniscience. There are knowledgeable politicians just as there are many more ignorant politicians who promote themselves far and above their station in politics and in life. The reporter must know the difference and threat them accordingly. Know your source: his competence, his standing in his party and his degree of truth-telling.

2. Politics has its own language, some kind of a patois. The political reporter must understand this and know when the avalanche of information spewed by the politician overwhelms the real news. Sometimes, with a politician it pays to read their lips, if not between the lines.

3. A good grounding in the political culture of the society is important. Sadly, for our political reporters, the fluidity in our political system has prevented such a culture from developing. Still, there are some characteristics in our political behaviour that might loosely qualify as our political culture. Take defections from one political party to another. This is done either individually or in a mass movement as happened to the ruling party, PDP, in 2014. This would look quite strange to people from settled political systems but the political reporter here must recognise it as one of the major failings in our party political system. We do not join political parties on the basis of ideological political convictions. The point here is that the political reporter must not try to impose on the political system that which is strange to it. What he sees is what he gets sans his personal judgement.

4. Libel is a constant danger in political reporting. Politicians are never without enemies; hence politics is a war by other means. The problem here is that a politician feels justified in making whatever allegations he may please against his political opponents or enemies. Such allegations may consist of misinformation, rumours elevated to the realm of facts and outright lies. And they drip with libel from its every pore. The fact that the politician makes the libellous statement does not protect the reporter, his editor and his company from being held liable in a libel writ.

5. The political reporter must learn not to take the politician’s word for it. His business is to provide the public with facts on which it can make a rational judgment in a given situation. He must, therefore, learn to treat whatever information he obtains from the politician as the basis for digging for facts and more facts.

6. Colourful or bombastic statements have their uses but they quite often mask or colour the facts in a given situation. The political reporter must learn to peel this onion ring by ring until he gets at the correct layer of untainted facts or of facts not so badly tainted.

7. Once a politician learns to trust a political reporter, he feels confident enough to dump all sorts of incredible documents on him. It is often tempting to treat such documents as authentic and factual. Most often, they are not. Politicians forge documents for the primary purpose of portraying their opponents in bad light in the public space. The reporter must not accept and act on such documents given to him on their face value. He must thoroughly check and re-check them. He must be fair to those mentioned in the documents too by obtaining their comments. They have the right to be heard in matters that concern them. A dead give away is when the politician hawks such documents from one news medium to another in a fishing expedition. If one medium rejects it another would accept and publish it. Few games can be more dangerous.

The political reporter bears a greater responsibility for what the public makes of the integrity of his medium than his counterparts on the other beats such as crime or even the economy. The simple explanation for this is that journalism and politics are mutually wired into each other’s DNA.  What the politician does or fails to do affects the economy. It could raise or lower the crime rate too. So, for the journalist, there is no escaping the politician and his looming shadow.  His greatest professional achievement is to remain neutral and true to the tenets of his profession and his editorial policy. (Concluded)