Jackson Free Press

In the middle of crazy campaign coverage over the last week, we saw this quote posted on Facebook: "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."

That is never truer than during campaign seasons when everybody wants their guy to win--and doesn't want to be wrong. The JFP has covered three city election seasons now, and won awards for reporting eight years ago (about Frank Melton's past) and four years ago (about the Better Jackson PAC's "Two Lakes" funders).

But that doesn't mean that reporting was popular at the time. Serious journalism often isn't, especially as it's happening. The very heart of what journalists are supposed to do is to dig out and publish information important to the public interest. If it wasn't hard to get, and controversial, the public would already know about it.

Alas, every election season, we become the messenger-under-attack for publishing the truth. We're used to it and expect it, but it doesn't make it less frustrating. The worst part isn't that the JFP is attacked by biased supporters of one or another candidates for putting out real information; it's that too many people seem to care more about who disseminates the tough information than what the 
info says about their candidate's readiness.

This was true last week, as we broke the news about Jonathan Lee's business troubles and the fact that he has never actually owned a business despite running as a business owner. Many of his supporters, helped out by The Clarion-Ledger (a shell of the newspaper that won the Pulitzer Prize in the 1980s), tried to refocus the entire story on who sent out the public information. Meantime, it was the public information, and how the candidate dealt with it being made public, that was the actual tell. 
 Make no mistake: Every media outlet relies on story tips every day to do our jobs. Good journalists will always focus on the information and what it means--not try to trash the sender (unless it was false information; then, all bets are off). Meantime, all the campaigns rat out public information on each other. Always will.

There is no greater test of a journalism outlet than how it handles itself during a political campaign. Our job is to focus on (a) where the candidate stands on substantive issues and (b) situations and facts that indicate how a public servant would really act under pressure. We also work very hard to provide context to every story we report, regardless of whether it's a political story. Episodic, horse-race reporting does not help strengthen a community.

We take this mission seriously, and we know it's often not popular. But we wouldn't be doing our job if we gave a whit about that. We would, in fact, be doing public relations.