Looking forward to and closely watching the vice presidential debate on Thursday night, I was eager to log on immediately after the debate came to a close to check out the New York Times' online coverage of it.
Sure enough, as soon as Gwen Eiffel ended the debate at Washington University in St. Louis, the New York Times already had an article up on its website. The article, written by Patrick Healy, was added to throughout the night as more information and insight came out.
The article's title did a good job of capturing the general sense of the debate as "cordial but pointed" and did and effective job of balancing focus on the political implications of the debate and the discussion of the key issues by the two vice presidential candidates.
Healy did a good job describing the back and forth action that took place between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, and careful observation of their debating techniques was relayed in the article through his descriptive analysis of their performance.
The article also does a good job of balancing reporting of the event and providing Healy's own research and information. Giving insight to the personal challenges of the candidates (Biden's loss of his wife and daughter in a car accident and Palin's newborn son with down syndrome), Healy gives context to where the candidates are coming from. Additionally, Healy corrects on false information exchanged during the debate, such as the time when Palin referred to General McClellan, when in fact she was speaking of General David McKiernan.
Although Healy seems to editorialize throughout the article in his description of the candidates' debating techniques, it is clear that the article intends to relay the journalist's perception of what went on during the debate, including how he felt the candidates performed.
The article can be found at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/us/politics/03debate.html?ref=us
3 comments:
Jay,
This was a very insightful blog post. I like how the beginning of your post showed that you were passionate about the topic by saying you were excited to watch the debate. It seemed like couldn't wait to post afterwards. It's nice to see another person that cares about the election like I do.
You also did a nice job summarizing the main points of the article and the ones you picked out really stuck in my mind after I was done reading.
Nice profile layout too by the way.
See you in class,
Colleen
Haha I totally agree with Colleen, and I thought this was a really great article to comment on.
I liked the points you made on Healy's editorial content in the story. Harrower says that stories like this regarding politics can have some basis for opinion but not much. The article does a good job walking this line.
I thought Healy did a really fine job assessing Palin and her debate skills as well, without patronizing her as many liberal news outlets have.
As Evan points out, it is a very fine line. The New York Times takes great latitude with injecting opinion. Politics, as opposed to some other topics, usually lends itself nicely to a little editorial content. But for our purposes, let's make sure to attribute everything! Given the evolving nature of this story throughout the night, I feel the reporter did an adequate job of including background info. Let that be a lesson to you in this digitally driven world: Always do your research beforehand. Once the story starts unfolding, you'll rarely have time to add context with editors breathing down your neck.
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