The final panel of the day brought together several local journalists. They probed further in to the issue of setting the agenda for your publication or broadcast. Do you use polls to define the issues? Talk to people on the street? Bring citizens into your newsroom? And how much do you pressure candidates to address specific issues? John Sundevor of the Fargo Forums spoke of forcing the issue by continuing to ask the same question until candidates answered it. Rochelle Olson of the Associated Press said that when candidates evade your questions "part of the story is also the answers they give you." We also heard a frustration among journalists over the lack of citizen interest. There was a general feeling that journalists can only do so much to create interest. As Bob Collins of Minnesota Public Radio remarked, "It is not my role as a journalist to shepherd people to the polls."

Lynda McDonnell of the St. Paul Pioneer Press: This is the first time I had been deeply involved in campaign coverage so it's been, of course, a real education for me. And what I found interesting [was] how does something get on our list of priority issues and then how do we cover it once it gets there? The taxes and education have been the big themes in the gubernatorial races.

Paul Hannah: [W]ho says they are themes, based on what definition?

Ms. McDonnell: In part because the candidates defined them, and in part because as Kate Parry mentioned earlier, the polls that we have say that citizens define them as the topics.

Mr. Hannah: So now we've got politicians who don't make a decision without looking at the polls and we have newspapers who don't write a story without looking at the polls?

Ms. McDonnell: Oh no we do write the stories too I think they make sense as issues. The question is, are they, is that a long enough list and are we covering [it] the right way?

Mr. Hannah: Well, but, you know, how can you say that that list is appropriate when two election cycles ago the top thing on the list was crime? Now it's not there so now we're really not talking to any of the candidates about crime anymore. Does that mean crime doesn't exist? No. What does that mean?

John Sundevor edits the Fargo Forum: Well, you're assuming that everybody is doing this according to polls. There are some of us that don't have the money to do a poll to determine how we're going to cover a political election.

Mr. Hannah: So how do you identify the issues?

Mr. Sundevor: Number one by talking to people on the street, people that you come in contact with. It's not hard to come to some conclusion on the issues that affect my area. I mean, it's been losing population since 1930's.

That would tell you that perhaps economic development would be a big issue for that area, you don't have to take a poll to find that out.

Ms. McDonnell: And you also ask them about issues that come up in the legislature, I mean, if somebody is running for governor you want to know where they stand on those things

Mr. Hannah: Let me talk to you about the citizenship group. Because I have tried to watch that coverage over the last couple of weeks, how is it that you ensure that the candidates respond to the questions? Because it seems to me one of the most frustrating things is if you let candidates talk in sound bites They just keep saying the same thing over and over and over again no matter what the question is. If you put them in a forum like some kind of a debate, nobody answers anything and at the end they are thanked by whoever moderates about what a wonderful job it was, but all we heard was the campaign stump speech in smaller snippets. How do you ensure that you actually get answers to the questions and not some candidate BS?

Dennis McGrath of the Minneapolis Star Tribune: Oh, I think we try to do that every time we have any interaction with the candidates, we are trying to press them to answer the question fully and completely. Try to answer the question that was put to them. But at the same time give them the freedom to address the issues that they want to because I don't think that the candidate should be filtered completely by the news media so that they are only allowed to talk about the subjects that we want them to talk about. I get very nervous when I hear discussions about the news media setting the agenda. You will talk about this and nothing else, and you will talk about it in this way. I think that gets into dangerous territory. I think the readers and the listeners are sophisticated enough to know when the candidates are answering the questions and when they are not.

Mr. Hannah: When is this all done, you send the questions over to a campaign?

Mr. McGrath: Uh-huh.

Mr. Hannah: So it's just somebody from the campaign answering the questions as far as you know?

Mr. McGrath: We do not reject answers. We do not say, no, this does not answer the question in our opinion.

Mr. Hannah: Do you think you should?

Mr. McGrath: No I think it's for the citizens then to determine whether or not the candidates are answering them. I don't think it's my job to sit there and say, good answer, nope, bad answer. I almost tried to do that once in an issues grid with a candidate on the abortion question

In discussing methods journalist use to get candidates to address specific issues, John Sundevor remarked: I sat on a panel at the beginning of the campaign and I asked each of the candidates during the primary campaign their rural development agenda. Not one of them was able to answer the question and this forum was set up in such a way that you couldn't have a follow-up, but I continued to ask the question until they started talking about rural development. And after a while Norm Coleman came out with a 20 million dollar border city redevelopment program. The Humphrey campaign came out with a five million dollar revolving loan program for rural economic development. So I do think that we do force the issue from time-to-time.

Bob Collins, reporter with Minnesota Public Radio: We broke the period of seven weeks before the primary into separate issues. Each week we would do an issue, crime, taxes, health care, economic development--which could include rural development, new baseball stadiums. And we would spend a great deal of time with each candidate and get the interviews we needed and then write the stories and then we would follow those up with talk shows during the week, all related to that theme. At the same time we would take all that material and also put it on our web site, so you could go to the web site and see a list of issues for each candidate and click your way to a happy, healthier, life.

Mr. Hannah: Rochelle, [the AP is] servicing a lot of media around the state. How does the AP identify the issues, and if so, how do they keep the candidates on track with those things?

Rochelle Olson, a reporter with the Associated Press pointed out that even if the candidate doesn't stick to the issue you put forward, the answer given can be a story in itself: Well, we identify them, I guess, in several meetings throughout the campaign season. We'll adjust them as it goes along, if we think we missed something, or if we think we can drop something. But, I mean, it's really not a matter of keeping them on the same issues You can ask him whatever questions you want, but part of the story is also the answers they give you

Mr. Hannah: What about what they don't choose or what they refuse to talk about? And by refusal I just mean by not answering the question, isn't that a legitimate story?

Ms. Olson: Well sure, and we did a story last week about the fact that Jesse Ventura doesn't want to come up with a tax proposal despite repeatedly being asked when are you coming out with this. We tried to explore that question.

Mr. Hannah: How do you [analyze a candidate's remarks] in a minute-and-half story, Pat Kessler?

Pat Kessler is producer the news for WCCO-TV in Minnesota: One of the best things about television is the impact of video and moving people with emotion. One of the most difficult things is figuring out what our issues are and finding out what they mean. We talked to a wide range of people on my beat, politically we try to sample opinion for analysis in colleges and universities, as well as something we call a community ascertainment. I think that is a kind of a fancy phrase for going out and meeting people. [R]eporters are required to meet with certain community groups and talk about what is important to them. That helps me a lot in my analysis which then gives me different perspectives about what I'm going to talk about in the political issues of the day. How do we do it in a minute and a half is tough. We do it in 30 seconds. We have something that I think is kind of silly, actually, we call it Inside Scoop. But I try to in five or six sentences distill what is the most important salient point of the politics of the day and say it in 30 seconds.

Mr. Hannah: What about the Ventura phenomenon, Dennis, are you to blame or to praise, depending on the circumstances for this rise to 20 percent?

Mr. McGrath: I think that the media should be given credit for expanding our coverage, and I think everyone has done that this year, not just the Star Tribune. Everybody has covered the Reform Party and Jesse Ventura as -- I don't know that I would say exactly as an equal with the other two, but pretty darn close. I think this is the first time that the Reform party has major party status [in Minnesota].

Mr. Kessler: I have a contrasting view. I think that we have not done a very good job with Jesse Ventura and privately we hear this mostly from the other candidates because they are afraid until now to do it themselves. And that is to treat Jesse the way we treat other candidates. I just called him Jesse, everybody seems to call him Jesse, nobody calls him by his last name as we normally do with all the other candidates. We don't call them Norm or Skip. But until now we have not used the kind of scrutiny on Jesse Ventura that we have on the other candidates. We press him for tax policy but don't report when he doesn't give it. There is also the issue on legalization of drugs. I think it's only now that he is getting equal scrutiny of the other candidates in my medium anyway.

On his radio talk show, for example, there is a quote that may be offensive to women. Now if another candidate said it we would take him to the wood shed. During a bass tournament on Lake Minnetonka he said, "I was in the boat and on one side we were looking for bass and on the other side we were looking for ass." Those are the kinds of issues we have not pursued with Jesse Ventura.

Ms. McDonnell: But is it, I mean, doesn't it make sense that when he starts to be seen as a more serious figure then we the media start to look more closely at these kinds of things?

[M]ost readings on how the American public feels about their lives [is that] most people are pretty satisfied. They're doing pretty well, but I know very well that not everybody is. And so, and many times the people who are struggling the hardest are the people who are least organized, have least money, don't have folks to call the newspaper to talk about their issues. Both newspapers are now starting to cover affordable housing more significantly because it's become part of the political agenda, particularly in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Should we have done a better job earlier? Yes. Should we be doing a better job now? Yes. Is that a sort of bias? I guess so. We are mainstream media. That's a good description of us because we cover more mainstream issues for the most part. But we do make an effort to get at those issues often when they become part of the political agenda

John Marty was a 1998 gubernatorial candidate who had dropped out by the time of this event. He attended the conference and offered his reaction: The analysis is improving and certainly the pushing for debates and coverage of those things, it's far greater, and I think there is broad agreement among people that it's improved in that way.

I think there are still some things that are frightfully lacking and I say that without suggesting it's the media's responsibility to make our democratic process work, because it's not solely the media's, it's the candidates, it's the media, it's the public's responsibility. And if the public isn't going to pay attention, the media can't fix it. If the candidates aren't going to cooperate, the media can't fix it. But certainly the media has a responsibility.

Mr. Hannah: As a candidate, do you believe that part of the media's responsibility is to call you to task for the positions you take when [your opponent decides that you] stepped over the line?

Mr. Marty: Well, I guess I would say it is somewhat the media's job. The media can't make the process work perfectly if the candidates aren't doing the right thing.

[T]he media does a relatively good job of trying to probe, but again it's not equal. You put out a plan and say, here is how you're going to pay for it. And as long as it meets certain standards the media will let you get away with it and maybe it doesn't meet them. One candidate put out a book this year and, and every editorial I've seen on it said, wow, this is wonderful balanced budget approach to things and where are the cuts going to come, well, across the board cuts here, or layoffs by attrition. No probing on that, it was just because the candidate said my opponent is the one without the budget or the candidate said, I'm the one with the balanced budget. Sometimes the analysis isn't deep enough, or hard hitting enough. We can't expect the media to fix our political problems but [they] should be probing

Mr. Hannah: Try to fashion a candidate's budget based on his statements taken in the campaign, is that, is that fair game?

Ms. McDonnell: [T]he first panel this afternoon asked for analysis. And I think the issue is often what kind of analysis and how deeply can you really go. We have various proposals for education and we've had our education reporter and one of our state house reporters work on some pieces just trying to pin down these candidates about what their ideas are and what do people who are real experts about improving education have to say. And basically what the people who are real authorities on this stuff say, is they don't know what they're in for. This is very simplistic stuff. They're talking about smaller class sizes and they're talking about increased tax credits and deductions, and they don't really have a clue about how complicated is it and it kind of scratches the surface. That, I think is important analysis

Amy Mitchell: [Geneva] talked about sort of the healthy contradiction between feeling accountable to certain constituencies, whether it's your sources or your public, and also feeling the need as journalists to be, somewhat guarded against the pressures that those groups can put on you. I think we're hearing that there is a certain accountability that you all feel toward candidates and giving them fair and accurate and honest coverage of what their campaign is, as you [do] other sources. Yet, [you've] also acknowledged that there needs to be sometimes an adversarial relationship, as Geneva put it between you and a candidate so that you can be accountable to the public, and to your other constituencies. I wonder if anybody on the panel can offer some constructive ways that journalists who are on that beat might go about trying to find that balance.

Mr. Collins: Be mean, Minnesotans are way too nice. The pressures are that everybody wants to be liked and that includes reporters. And everybody wants to do their jobs and that includes reporters too. Candidates I find on the whole are pretty good about understanding the difference between the job that we have [and] the job they have, I think.

Mr. Kessler: I couldn't disagree more. [I] have been disliked and berated and hated by more politicians on more days than I think that I can count. And one of them is sitting in the room, John Marty calls me when I do something he thinks is unfair. It is far from true that we try to protect our sources. I don't know that I've ever thought that. It is far from true that we don't want to ask tough, even mean questions. I do that frequently, perhaps almost all the time. And it's also not true that we don't think about who our consumers are, because I don't believe it is the politicians I cover, I believe it is the people who watch me on television and watch the stories that I do.

One of my greatest frustrations is that we broadcast, we don't narrow cast, we broadcast stories to the largest number of people with something that we think affects most of them and a lot of time we don't do it well enough, we don't cover a story well enough. I hope that over time we are episodic [in the] way we are covering a budget. We can only cover part of it or perhaps one important aspect of it on one day. But over the period of months of a campaign we hope you get a sense of where people are. But I cannot, the only constituency that I believe I answer to is the viewers. I don't believe I have, I'm accountable to the politicians I cover really.

Ms. Kathleen Hansen: You don't have to answer to your producers, Pat?

Mr. Kessler: No. I don't. I have a responsibility to be accurate, number one. I have a responsibility to be fair and many people argue what that means. But, no, I don't have a responsibility for the show producers, no, my responsibility is to report accurately and fairly what happen today

Mr. Hannah: What are you doing now that you didn't do when you first started doing political reporting?

Mr. Kessler: Only a lot less of it. I think we've seen that. There is a much greater competition for the news time and it does go in cycles. There will be some elections where people want me on the air all the time. And there will be other times--I felt like the primary of this year was one of those--where I had a really hard time getting on the air. Partly because of Monica Lewinsky, partly because of the number of candidates, partly because of the Northwest strike. The competition for air time is very, very fierce. And that is perhaps the biggest difference that I see. I have a hard time getting on the air and when I'm on it's just a very short piece.

Mr. McGrath: I'd like to just answer that question as to what, I think, we're doing differently. I think there are quite a number of things that we are doing differently. And I would start with coverage of the mass media in the political arena: Ad watches. I think that there has been a real realization by the news media of the power of television advertising. I think as that exploded within campaigns the news and the print media and the broadcast media became more cognizant of how the campaigns were using it. Became more critical in terms of analyzing it and following it and reporting upon it

I think another thing that we've done is we have followed the money more. I think that maybe we don't do it as much as should, John, but I think that we are paying a lot more attention to it. I think we're doing it in more sophisticated ways. We're using database and spreadsheets and we're spending more time and resources and news space in terms of tracking, and trying to figure out what it means.

And I would say a third thing that I think that we've done and are doing differently is bringing citizens into the debate more. I think our citizens' forum and other news media have different methods in which they do that. But I think we have citizen voices in our coverage a lot more. We are posing questions from the citizens to the candidates. That's something we didn't have when I started covering politics 10-15 years ago.

Ms. McDonnell: I think one, to address the general issue of social responsibility. One of the worrisome trends in newspapers is a focus increasingly on high demographic readers. That in terms of where we put our circulation push and I know that Geneva Overholser mentioned this a little bit this morning. Where we put our circulation push, where we put our increased resources, they tend to be on higher income readers, higher income areas that advertisers are more interested in. And one of the things that we're struggling with as an industry because of exactly the sort of identity politics, the sort of splintering of the population along various interest groups [W]e've always seen ourselves as sort of this place where [of the issues] talked about you can drop the same idea in a thousand minds all at the same time. So we were the mass media, we were there for everybody. Although, you know, both externally we're finding that younger readers are not as interested in what we're doing so we're trying to do things to attract them. Television has the same issue with cable and Internet and all these other alternatives that people have. So part of our issue [is] what is our community of interest now and how do we enlarge that or at least maintain that. And then on the other side internally we have this economic pressure that pushes us to really concentrate on growing circulation among particular types of readers, and I think that is of concern. But it's of concern.

Mr. Collins: [I] still cling to the hope that it makes a difference. I started putting this coverage together in March. I work weekends. I work nights. I get up in the middle of the night to hear what talk show people are saying. I start early in the morning with the usual debate at MPR in the story meeting which we yell, scream at each other over what stories are good and I love it. And I might end up at 11:00 or 12:00 editing these stories and then I go to sleep for a couple of hours and I have done that for months. And so I have some really good reporters who have worked, like you can't imagine But on primary night we're all sitting around eating cold pizza, having worked like crazy for months, and 17 percent of the people came out and voted. I don't know how to reach any other conclusion than what we did didn't matter. And, and the funny part is we cycled up again and we're doing it again.

We're going at it just as hard, probably harder, knowing that maybe it doesn't matter. And, you know, I just will never apologize for what I do for a living if I'm in the mass media, ever. I think someone who goes out of their way to avoid knowledge about what's going on in their community is the biggest threat to this process. And I know we can do better. We've never ever done more politics than we're doing now. We have never ever done it better, ever. And that's all I think anybody could ask. All I can ask is that the audience, whether they love us, hate us, think we get up in the morning with a bias, uphold their end of the bargain. Go out of their way, go to a web site that we run or somebody else run, pick up a paper. At least invest five minutes to find out that you don't agree with what's in it. I don't think that's too much to ask Kate Parry: There have been a lot of remarks today of dismay about voter turnout, citizen participation in the political process. Do you view it as part of your job or your reporters' jobs to not only inform but to inspire citizens to active citizenship? And the second part of it, perhaps not speaking about your own product or station or news service, have you seen something in the reporting of this gubernatorial election where you looked at it and thought, now there is something that would bring someone new into this, there is something that would catch their eye, have you seen that this year?

Ms. McDonnell: I don't know that it's our job, I mean as far as inspiring people goes, you try to write stories that are interesting. You do try to write stories so that people read them and understand how it affects their lives. I mean, I don't know what else I can do other than trying to show them the impact that a candidate's position or candidate's skill would have on their lives. But then, I mean, a month ago somebody asked me after Ð like Bob said Ð working all summer does Norm Coleman support abortion rights, how about Skip Humphrey? And these are people who read the paper. I'm kind of at a loss at how you would inspire somebody. Other than trying to show them the relevance, make the story readable, catching somebody's eye I think one of the frustrations, those of us who have worked long and hard at this field is that many people don't really get interested until the last two weeks and, you know, we sort of wanted them tuning in June or March. And at that point we can't redo everything we've been building for the last several months. I think we've tried to do a lot of things. Some of it's funny stuff, it's silly stuff. The Star Tribune did a piece on the candidates wives and who are they, and what issues would be interesting to them if they were First Ladies. So I think we've tried to come at this in various ways to get people interested. To take issues, write stories, do profiles, do analysis that we thought would be of interest to people. And it is very frustrating when 19 percent of the people show up Generally I think we have made a big push and have done by our lights a pretty good job, and yet, there are other forces that make people apathetic that we don't seem to be able to have a great deal of influence over.

Mr. Collins Well it's to my advantage to make my stories as readable as possible, but it is not my rule as a journalist to shepard people to the polls. I think we've got the tail of the dog here and we're trying to train the dog by holding onto its tail. And it's not the news media that's causing people to stay away from the polls. We talk daily about personal responsibility in society. Well society people have to take responsibility for their lives. When it comes to voting the ultimate responsibility, we're all looking at the news media and saying, you must not have done your job. That doesn't make sense to me. I've got a relative that's an executive in a large corporation, doesn't read any newspaper. He calls us to find out what's on TV or at the movies because they don't buy a newspaper. Didn't vote in the primary election because her boss forgot to tell her on primary election day that it was time to vote.

Now am I supposed to really get upset and feel sorry for that person? I can't. I've done my job and I'm doing it the best I can. If the public does not want to take advantage of the information that's put there, then they get the results that they really deserve. That's how I look at it.

Finally, Bill Buzenberg, Director of News and Information at Minnesota Public Radio, summed up the day.

Mr. Buzenberg: The premise we had today I think, is that we all want to be accurate, fair, and balanced, but we're in danger of flunking out. Our grades are slipping except in election coverage. We are not as accurate, fair, and balanced as we should be. Our reporters are less knowledgeable than they should be. They have less expertise Our arrogance is sometimes breathtaking, that's enemy number one. Anonymous sources are out of control. The public feels a sense of powerlessness which should concern us. The public has even given up on correcting us from our errors and that's dangerous. Sometimes the public is even giving up on watching us.

We learned something stunning about money today and profits. The average company makes about seven percent return. Banking makes twice as much, fifteen percent. Local TV makes thirty to forty percent return. The First Amendment is the public's gift to us. It's an enormous responsibility, however, to serve the public. That gift, in fact, is not just a license to make money.

Now what can we do? Here is some front-end work. Here is what I came up with. There are about nine quick things. There is no substitute for hiring, keeping, paying intelligent, knowledgeable, hardworking journalists, some of whom we heard right now. They need time to report on the air. They need leadership in the newsroom. We talked a lot about editors, that is a hands-on role, and sometimes they have to make reporters mad. Sometimes the corporation responsibility is not just to the shareholders. We need more training money, our business is notoriously low in training. We need more paid interns. We should report on our own business and our own corporations better than we do. Sometimes we need incentives to be more fair and accurate and balanced

What do we do after the fact or after an error when there weren't facts? We should embrace complaints better. These are gifts. I like that phrase. We should be open. We should listen. We need better corrections, that's clear The ombudsman and reader's advocate are a good idea, we need those. News councils are a good idea, we need those. Only Minnesota and Hawaii have them. They do help us all set standards and they don't just shoot the wounded.

This afternoon, what did we learn about elections? I think there was a consensus first of all that this has been a well-covered, dull campaign in which few people will vote. However, we get A for improvement, although we can't seem to agree on the percentage that voted in the primary election, was it 17 or 19 percent?

We do care. The good news is that the quantity of our reporting is way up, much more than '94. There are problems with the quality. We need new ideas. Too much is the same old parade that we're covering. The ad watches run once, the ads many times. We don't read books or white papers or precision papers, but that's okay because most candidates aren't writing them anyway. We need to relate the coverage better to people's every day lives.

In the glut of information that's pouring over us we need to work harder on context, on critical analysis and less coverage of spin. We're doing this. The media can and has set the agenda in the campaign on many issues including affordable housing. Sometimes we force candidates to speak in glib 15-second sound bites, but sometimes that's okay because some reports are only 30 seconds long. We are too easily bored with serious issues, sometimes our readers are too. We are not easily seriously bored with Jesse Ventura, we had a good discussion of Jesse, I think. Money and politics is not covered adequately but we are trying. Maybe we need to be tougher on all kinds of numbers. We are bringing citizens into the debate much more and into the Web sites.

Really, in sum, it's been a very important day on important subject. I would say that we are not flawless but what we've had is a real tribute to the media in Minnesota. It's still a great profession and you heard some of the passion that people have for it.