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Why did Philly papers miss the provisional ballot fiasco?
The data finally confirms what should have been obvious to local media (but was not) for nearly a week: a problem surely did exist.
Why did Philly papers miss the provisional ballot fiasco?
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It's official: Philadelphia voters cast 27,100 provisional ballots on Election Day 2012, about twice as many as in 2008. It's not yet clear what caused the problem, which forced droves of angry citizens to use a less dependable form of ballot. But the data finally confirms what should have been obvious to local media (but was not) for nearly a week: A problem surely did exist.
By Tuesday afternoon, reports from election workers and voters citywide indicated that large numbers of registered voters mysteriously not showing up on the rolls were being forced to cast provisional ballots. City Paper's story was posted at 2:17 p.m. Not so at Philly.com, the shared e-home of The Inquirer and Daily News, which resembled the homepage priorities at Fox News: a mural about Barack Obama was accidentally not covered up at a Northeast Philadelphia school cafeteria polling place. It dominated coverage all day. All. Day. Long.
Both papers included provisional ballot stories in their Wednesday editions, but editors seemed mysteriously resistant to acknowledging the story's importance — perhaps following the lead of the City Commissioners, who downplayed the issue all day on Tuesday.
If Pennsylvania's elections had been close, the legal fight over Philadelphia's provisional ballots would have been top news nationwide. Yet on Nov. 7, the Inquirer chose to stick with an obviously-planned-in-advance-but-now-way-outdated soft-focus profile of City Commissioners Chairwoman Stephanie Singer and how hectic her job is ("The head city commissioner's busiest day of the year"). She was ousted as chairwoman a few hours after the paper hit city doorsteps. Awkward.
I'm not bragging about City Paper's journalistic prowess (though neither friends nor critics would put that past me): We employed neither secret nor ingenious reporting methods. I visited polling places across the city at random all morning and spoke to election workers. I received call after e-mail after tweet from voters who said they were forced to cast provisional ballots. The Committee of Seventy issued an alert highlighting the problem. By late morning, it seemed clear that this was a huge story. By afternoon, the crisis was showing up at The Washington Post, Huffington Post and Slate.
Was access to the internet down at the papers' new Market Street headquarters?
The drama continued: The Obama campaign went to court that afternoon, demanding that extra provisional ballots be delivered and were rebuffed. As polls neared the 8 p.m. closing time, City Paper reporters investigated complaints from poll workers near Temple and Penn, where student-heavy precincts were forcing reportedly record numbers of voters to cast provisional ballots.
What reporting that did begin to emerge at the Inquirer and Daily News on the subject was still buried deep inside the bowls of Philly.com (with which, full disclosure, City Paper has a content-sharing agreement). And there were good articles on the subject: WHYY's Holly Otterbein highlighted the issue in her evening report, and the Daily News' Jan Ransom had a short but detailed story posted by late Tuesday night. [I didn't see the TV news on Tuesday]
What's inexplicable here is not how City Paper's three-person news team covered this story — the basic story was, again, rather straightforward — but why the Inquirer and Daily News' editors insisted on downplaying it.
My esteemed colleague Patrick Kerkstra wrote in his Friday column, "I'm skeptical that the problems Tuesday were far-reaching or all that unusual." Fair enough: He was trying to poke holes in the idea that Commissioners Al Schmidt and Anthony Clark ousted Singer for purely noble and apolitical reasons.
But by Sunday, the Inquirer was still on the defensive over its non-coverage. "Whether anybody 'screwed up' provisional ballots is questionable," wrote Bob Warner, a day before he would report that there had in-fact been a big screw up.
The big problem is not what any of the Inquirer and Daily News' stellar and award-winning journalists did or didn't report — as I wrote last month, both papers (and many other outlets), did a fantastic job covering voter ID. What's astounding is that anyone who visited Philly.com on election day looking for that day's big Philly story wouldn't have found it. The story of why that happened still hasn't been written.
Because Philadelphia newspapers no longer exist in any meaningful way - something true for local broadcast news, as well.— oneday
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