There are lessons from the conference for journalists, for public policy makers, and for westerners. This white paper describes the major themes of the conference. The Andrus Center for Public Policy explored these perceptions and looked at how public policy, particularly public policy affecting so-called “western issues,” is impacted by national media coverage and the perspective of reporters and editors who cover the west but often do not live in the west. There is a culture out here that is different from Manhattan… More important, perhaps, we wondered whether we could explore how national news coverage of our regional fights over issues like endangered species and forest fire policy helped shape national policy around those issues.” Those discussions often ended with our wondering whether the national news media… really understood how critically… we view their work… There is a vastness west of the 100th meridian that you people don’t understand.
#DATELINE REPORTERS SERIES#
“This conference came about as the result of a series of discussions with a variety of people from coast to coast over the last couple of years. He described the genesis of the Center’s Dateline: The West conference: Andrus, Secretary of Interior in the Carter Administration and four-term Governor of Idaho, is the chairman of the Andrus Center. It could also be that the national media, in the sense that it can be spoken of as one monolithic entity, just doesn’t understand or report on the west very well.Ĭecil D. Political centers, the complexity and contentious nature of many of the region’s public policy debates, and-it may pain a westerner to admit- a certain parochial attitude springing from the west as a place of rugged individualism and hard-dying myth. The criticism in the west of the media’s treatment of western issues is undoubtedly the product of many factors: distance from the nation’s media and As consumers of news, readers, viewers, and listeners in the western United States are often critical, even very critical, of this product, which many see as incompletely or inaccurately portraying their territory, their issues, and their concerns. What we see every day in the columns of newspapers and magazines and what we see and hear from broadcast news outlets are often the products of this mutually dependent clash of responsibilities. Each is dependent on the other in order to carry out their responsibilities. The makers and implementers of public policy have one job, and journalists have another. The junction where public policy and journalism meet is a stormy place, and it should be. Pacific Group, the conference was made possible and underwritten by the APME Credibility Roundtables Project and by the Brainerd, Bullitt, Key, Lazar, Mellon and Moore Foundations. In addition to the Andrus Center, the Idaho Statesman, and the Gannett Co. Katy Roberts, a senior editor at the New York Times, Tom Kenworthy, national correspondent for USA Today, and Scott Kraft, national editor of the Los Angeles Times. Also participating in the conference were Headlining the conference was Peter Jennings, anchor and senior editor of ABC World News Tonight, who participated in the panel and gave a public address in the evening. Simpson, a frequent and outspoken critic of the media, spoke at noon, and in the afternoon, Marc Johnson, President of the Andrus Center, led a panel of journalists, interest-group representatives, and decision-makers through a series of hypothetical news events1 that illustrated the media’s role in portraying and shaping policy and perceptions about the western United States. Former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan K. These presenters were followed by a panel discussion, moderated by the Center’s Senior Fellow, Dr. In order to give appropriate grounding in the subject to the 400 conferees, we began the morning with three presentations by respected experts in the field of news coverage analysis: Conrad Smith of the University of Wyoming, Jacob Bendix of Syracuse University, and Walter Dean of the Project for Journalistic Excellence and the Committee of Concerned Journalists. The purpose of the gathering was to explore how news organizations make decisions about what to report and why, and how those decisions, in turn, affect public opinion and public policy decisions, which are often made far from the west.
#DATELINE REPORTERS DOWNLOAD#
Download Printable Version (PDF) IntroductionĪ day-long conference, Dateline: The West, was held Decemat Boise State University and was presented by the Andrus Center for Public Policy, the Idaho Statesman, and the Gannett Co.
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