The harder questions

What Ted said:

Politics lends itself to facile issues, to facile answers. The problem is you've got the rhetoric and you've got the reality. The rhetoric is, you've got candidates talk about bringing all those jobs back and not giving tax breaks to companies that send jobs overseas. The problem with that is that it only tells half the story. One of the reasons America has been able to keep inflation down is precisely because WalMart imports all that stuff out of China, and Vietnam and Bangladesh and all the other places. What I really want to hear is how these candidates are going to deal both with the issue of brinign jobs back to places like Michigan, and at the same time keeping inflation lower. The media doesn't cover it. Labor has not been a top story for a long time in this country. I hope it becomes that story again. It needs to be a much bigger story. Media these days tend to cover stories that are immediate. What is most recent, not necessarily what is most important. Getting into the whole labor issue, that's a tough story, it's a complicated story. It's not easily covered just by sending a crew out for an hour or two and bringing them back for a Live at 5 o'clock. It requires more work, and there aren't quite as many news organizations out there that want to do that kind of story.

This bit of wisdom (via Kevin Anderson) came at the end of the Democratic National Convention, where 15,000 journalists congregated to watch a highly-choreographed four-day infomercial where absolutely no news happened.

We knew beforehand that Joe Biden will be Barack Obama's running mate. Obama has been the presumptive nominee (glad we can finally dump that phrase) since June (or arguably March). The only remaining questions concerned the presentation: Would Hillary Clinton give Obama the support he needed? Would Bill Clinton talk more about his presidency or Obama's? How many people could the Democrats pack into Invesco Field, and how many would watch on TV? Would anybody screw up?

Now, we need real answers to real questions, and Koppel raises many. I have my own, and I'll be posting them here, along with whatever answers I find.

Much of what really matters in this election, and what will continue to matter after, takes more reporting that many news organizations won't provide. Much of it is dull, hard to find, decidely unsexy. But it's critical.

Some of this will happen. Some of it will come from newspapers, wires, blogs. Some might even come from TV. I hope projects like Spot.us, which I'm grateful to be a part of, will help fill the void, too, especially on local issues and local impact. Because I really do want to know.

Before: Did Bush get it right on China? | After: There's no 'I' in team, but there sure is in China