We’re looking for voter guides from our local media outlets. Something that can tell us about, say, Pete Gifford.
ABC Action News is “Taking Action for You,” and invites you to Democracy 2008, which can fill you in on all of the happenings in the presidential race and national politics. I was unable to find a “local races” page.
10connects.com wants to help you “connect,” but not with local races. Their election page is overwhelmed with stories about the presidential race.
MyFox Tampa Bay allows you to track political news – as long as it’s national. Their Voter Info page are just links to local county elections web sites.
Luckily, the two daily newspapers as well as the 24 hour news station Bay News 9 have published real voting guides online for residents to reference and scan over for information about the candidates.
…though it’s easy to nitpick the shortcomings, the efforts of TBO, the Times, and BN9 (read about them after the jump) are far greater than those above.
Tampa Tribune / WFLA Newschannel 8 / TBO.com
Tampa Bay Online has implemented what could be a very powerful tool with the 2008 Voter Guide. It boasts a lot of interactivity and allows you to make personal notes about the candidates or the race. Providing personal information (your address) is required to start this feature and inputting your own choices on each race. But that’s a mere formality.
After you begin, strangely you need to manually select certain races (in my case, I had to pick which county commission races I would like to review) and then you’re sent onward through your ballot. You can leave notes, you can make your selections and in some instances – you can find information on the candidates in the races.
Note that. In some cases.
Never mind the fact the Tribune editorial board has made their endorsements and interviewed the candidates themselves. “The candidate has not yet provided a response.” is featured over and over again when candidates have not filled out a form sent to them to complete. This presents quite a void to fill and is disappointing. It’s could be seen as evidence of recent staff cuts at the Media Center in Tampa as well.
Third party candidates are also excluded in some races for congress… and though the third party candidates have little exposure, they still should be presented as options in these races.
Oh, and whatever you do? Don’t hit the BACK Button on your browser while filling out your form.
TBO.com also hosts Election 2008 (aka Decision 08) – all about the presidential race. The Politics page is also all about the presidential race. The Politics RSS feed includes some local stories spritzed in with national.
St. Petersburg Times / tampabay.com
Meanwhile the St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Bay.com have their Know Your Candidates section. These listings, while filled in, are full of generalities and only has limited positions on issues as the TBO Voter Guide attempts to do. It’s been habitual for the Times to list assets and liabilities of each candidate as personal and financial — never political. Never managerial. Never executive. No matter what the office.
Does a candidate’s mortgage on his or her home really matter compared to, say, a scandal involving them and or rumors of corruption and law breaking? Should an asset be listed alone as their property or perhaps the political goodwill they have a record of spreading? Perhaps their record in office?
They do host the Bay Buzz Blog, which includes local political news (yay!) from around the region. And although the official Politics page is top-heavy with national stuff, you can scroll down and easily find state and county-wide political information. tampabay.com also hosts the Buzz Blog, which is mostly about statewide politics.
Of course, both newspapers have also endorsed candidates, but they only share those with you indirectly via a link on the main pages.
Bay News 9
But probably the most upsetting entry of these three voting guides is Bay News 9. With 24 hour coverage and a strong link in to their online endeavor through their telecasts, it seems they don’t know the difference between the primary and general elections. Of course, that’s if you can even find the Local Elections page.
Of the four links that fall under “Politics” in the site navigation, none of them point to the voter guide. It may be an in-progress story for BN9 but voting has started in Florida.
Bay News 9’s Election08 is all about the presidential race, but they do have their Political Connections television show (sparse info online) that looks at State and Local elections. The Florida Decides page is mostly about the presidential race, too.
When one does actually find the local elections guide, they find that the reviews of the candidates are banal and short. Think of my complaint about the Times “Know your candidates” and remove 3/4ths of the information on the pages that the Times published and you have an idea just how thorough the bios for candidates are.
It’s up to YOU
In review — I sure hope you’ve done your homework on each candidate… Through past news stories, through the candidates’ own web sites and other sources, because the local media is unable to put all of that information together through a single, comprehensive voting guide.
dcdave
1 year ago
It’s worth noting that TBO’s voter guide is just something they bought.
Matt Neistein
1 year ago
It’s also worth nothing that when something says “The candidate has not yet provided a response,” it means just that. If a questionnaire is sent to a candidate and it’s not returned, despite several reminders, there’s not a whole people in the Media Center can do about it, regardless of how many – or how few – of them there are.
John
1 year ago
Matt, how many questions did they ask the candidates in person in their interviews? How many articles can be drawn upon from research? How many voting records can be explored?
That would take research. And that is a question of staff.
For a non profit entity that does the questionaire thing (and several web sites do just that with candidates), I can understand simple questionnaires. From an extension of a huge corporate entity that specializes in media? That’s cost cutting, bottom dollar journalism.
Matt Neistein
1 year ago
John, questionnaires and their length varied based on the race. You can see the questions we asked, and the number of them, in the Voter Guide.
You’re mistaking the Voter Guide for coverage. It is by no means the beginning and end of our political coverage, and your implication that it is betrays your lack of awareness regarding our political coverage.
The VG is just a tool in that coverage. It allows readers to see what races they’ll be voting on in a compact, simple form, and to compare candidates in those races in the candidates’ own words. It is not a research-oriented tool. It’s a database collated by us using information the candidates give. Thus, it is completely unbiased and completely objective. If the candidate sounds like an idiot, that’s on him or her. If they choose not to respond, the voter can determine what that means.
Implying that we haven’t explored voting records and done further research is an insult to Windy March, Cheryl Segal and everyone else here who has been writing daily for the last two months on the election, from national to local levels. If you don’t like that coverage, or think it’s inadequate, that’s one thing. But to act as if it doesn’t exist at all is ridiculous.