Getting It Right

Campus Report ^ | September 04, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

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Getting It Right

by: Bethany Stotts, September 04, 2008

Given the historic nature of this year’s election, the issue of race has been repeatedly brought up in news coverage of the election, whether for Senator Joe Biden’s (D-Del.) controversial “clean” and “articulate” remarks, allegations of unfair attacks by the Hillary Clinton (D-NY) campaign, or John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) claim that the Barack Obama (D-Ill.) campaign was illegitimately using the “race card” during his campaign speeches.

According to Keith Woods, the Dean of Faculty at the Poynter Institute, it is not necessarily a bad thing for reporters to cover racial issues, but he argues that the media has been doing so improperly. During a News University webinar on election coverage, he complained about how the media has improperly conflated Obama’s presidential aspirations with his ethnic background.

“I’ve often seen in reporting, though, this phrase, that [Obama] ‘strives to become the first African-American president,’ and here we have taken two facts. (This is in the LA Times online),” he said during the webinar. “We have taken the fact that he strives to become president and the fact that if elected he becomes the first African-American and we have taken motivation and result and combined them into this sentence—and now his motivation is to become the first black president.”

Woods specializes in diversity and race relations. Co-author of The Authentic Voice/The Best Reporting on Race & Ethnicity, Woods condemned such statements as shoddy journalism, saying, “It is almost like saying that ‘John McCain strives to become the oldest person ever elected to the presidency’ and I would venture that McCain would not like to see that phrasing in any story although it is equally true.” He believes that Obama seeks not to be the first African-American president, but simply to be president...