Otterblog

First things first: I was wrong. I said last week that Gloria Whisenhunt would come in second place in the 31st Senate GOP primary. She came in third, after Pete Brunstetter and Nathan Tabor.

The lesson from this race, to my way of thinking, is the clout of the immigration issue. Tabor rode it hard and, at least at the outset, established himself as THE candidate who would fight hardest on this. His campaigning pushed Brunstetter to the right as well, but with no general election, Brunstetter won’t get punished or reminded of those positions much anymore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Nathan Tabor eventually ends up in the seat now held by Larry Brown in the state house, but that’s another story for another day.

Election nights are crazy in a newsroom. A lot of pizza. A lot of waiting. Then cramming it all in as quickly as possible.

Newspapers such as the Journal spend a lot of time and resources covering politics and candidates. Does it make a difference? Yes. Some quick examples. John Garwood lost a GOP primary in the 45th Senate District. We’ve extensively covered his nonvote that allowed the lottery legislation to pass. The Turpin brothers in Stokes County lost in the GOP primary for county commissioner seats. Growth and school funding issues have been at the center of our coverage there. Allen Whitaker lost the GOP sheriff’s primary in Davie County. We’ve detailed problems in his department for the past several years.

This isn’t to say we have reporting agendas to get rid of candidates. But issues matter. Even—or especially—when there are low voter turnouts.

We’re in the midst of working on coverage regarding today’s protests regarding changes in our nation’s immigration policies. It’s a big, sprawling event, and it speaks to some of the internal debates in newspapers about the news value of protests.

We tend to shy away from publicity-seekers, and staged events are often particularly dry. In addition, there’s a bit of the bomb scare in all of this, i.e. we don’t cover bomb scares normally, because of the belief that covering them leads to more bomb scares. But when thousands upon thousands of people do something in a coordinated effort to draw attention to an issue, it becomes news just for the sheer bulk of it all. Anything large enough eventually acquires its own gravitational pull and can’t be ignored.

But what is large enough? 50,000 people on the Capitol Mall in Washington is little more than a blip. But put 5,000 people in Greensboro, and it’s on the front page. So there’s a great deal of relativism in what becomes news.

There are those who argue that covering protests gives too large a voice to people who have a complaint against the government. I disagree. Protest and assembly are vital parts of our democratic system. It is just a fact of life that most of these rallies are against the powerful. That’s why it’s called a protest. But that said, when 5,000 people gather locally to support a government action, we’ll be there.

A quick plug: Tony Flint, a friend and former colleague of mine, has written an articulate book about development, called This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America, published by Johns Hopkins press. It’s a well-done overview of how we got to this point of exurban McMansions, long commutes and disfunctional communities.