Archive: Opinions

Election season is upon us.  In the typical election atmosphere of hyperbole and negative campaigning it seems to me that there is not a lot for voters to go on when they decide to vote.  So I like to ask the same questions to all the candidates in contested races that Lansing people vote in.  I try to get them to talk about actual issues.  The questions I ask each candidate are the same, but the answers seldom are.  That's a good thing -- voters can decide on who they want to represent them based on what the candidates say, in their own words.

For today's issue I talked to the Lansing candidates for Tompkins County Legislature.  Next week I plan to run interviews for the two incumbents on the Lansing Town Board, and the following week the two challengers for Town Board seats.  While we won't elect a Congressperson until next year I am trying to get interviews now because the negative campaigning is already in full swing.  I do have one congressional candidate interview scheduled and hope to be able to talk to the other one as well.

I like doing these interviews.  My pet peeve with modern journalism is how much it has swayed toward opinion and away from actual news.  While it is impossible to write anything without someone thinking it is biased, I like letting the news speak for itself.  It may not be as sexy as opinion and argument, but it is pretty interesting on its own merits.  So even if my biases do seep in, the candidates get to have their say with minimal editing by me.

Minimal editing?  What's that mean?  I edit out often repeated phrases like 'you know' and because spoken English is different from the written form I adjust sentence structure when the spoken version (which may sound just fine when spoken) makes the candidate read as stupid or illiterate.  I try to balance that by keeping most of it as it was said because I think it is important to get a sense of the candidate's voice... the way they say things as well as what they say.

In a way the interviews give me an advantage over most voters because I talk to candidates directly and can look them in the eyes and see their facial expressions and ask follow-up questions.  I have to admit that over the years some of them have changed my mind about how I planned to vote.  But I like to think the format of asking the same questions and then letting the candidates run with it gives voters almost as much insight as a personal conversation would have.

I love to ask big, general questions and see what specific directions the candidates go with them.  I think that says a lot about their thinking and how they approach public service.  This week's interviews are no exception.  Look at the candidates' answer to my question about focussing the Legislature on issues it actually has jurisdiction over.  They each gave very different answers, and both were surprising in very different ways.

I am also surprised sometimes when candidates get their facts wrong.  This happens more often than you would think.  I struggle with that because I always want to jump in and set the record straight.  But doing that appears as if I am undermining one candidate or another, so I restrain myself and let their words speak for themselves.  Years ago there was one candidate who got something so awfully wrong that I turned off the recorder and told him the facts.  I never like making people sound like idiots and I just couldn't stand that he was advocating something that was simply illegal, though philosophically it didn't sound bad.  His answers 'on the record' were very different after that.

I am not sure I did the right thing in that case.  As it turns out he was not elected (probably a good thing given how unprepared he was), but it was a case where I didn't give him the opportunity to sound as massively unprepared as he actually was.  In hindsight I am not sure I did readers any favors by doing that.  On the other hand I would have had to explain that his facts were wrong because many readers might not have known how impossible the things he was advocating were.  And that would have looked like I was undermining him.

Since then I have not tried to set the record straight in these interviews.  My feeling is that their opponents and/or voters can write 'Letters to the Editor' if they want to, and that keeps me neutral.

Finally, I try hard not to favor any candidate in these interviews or anywhere in the newspaper.  Sometimes I'm stuck with what I get -- or what I don't get -- from the candidates, and that does color our election coverage to some extent.  In our own local reporting I try to keep things level.  The Star has a policy of not endorsing candidates.  I think that's the right thing to do.  Give them a venue for their voices to be heard, and let the voters compare and decide.

So I encourage you to read these interviews from start to finish.  Weigh what the candidates say and base your vote on the one you think will best represent Lansing.  There is an 'Elections 2013 Articles' link in the middle column on the Front Page that will bring you to a list all the interviews we've done for this year's election, even after they have been archived, so you can reread them closer to election day or catch any you have missed.

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