Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee raised questions not only about her qualifications to hold the nation’s second-highest office, but also the suitability of someone with a journalism background to succeed in politics at the national level. First, a disclaimer: although Sarah Palin (then Sarah Heath) graduated from the University of Idaho with a journalism degree, I’ve never met her. When she attended the University in the late 1980s, I was an editor of the local daily newspaper, but I never encountered her on campus or in the community. I briefly spoke to her on the telephone in the autumn of 2006 after she won the Republican primary for election as Alaska Governor.

After graduation, Palin worked briefly as a news reporter and anchor for a television station in Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. And in an interview with a University of Idaho student in 2007, the Governor said she developed an affinity for politics as a reporter, and her decision to run for office was a natural progression of her interest in local government. “I was always asking everyone the questions, and I still am today,” Palin said. But ease in asking questions didn’t immediately translate to facility in answering them. In a series of interviews with the American television networks ABC and CBS in September,Governor Palin stumbled over questions posed by network news anchors, although in her supporters’ eyes, she redeemed herself with her telegenic performance in an October 2 debate with the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Senator Joe Biden.

Governor Palin stirred a minor media ethics controversy in late September, when, prodded by a blogger, she implied that some of the questions from the network TV anchors, particularly Katie Couric of CBS, had been “gotcha” questions aimed at tripping her up. “Well, I have a degree in journalism also, so it surprises me that so much has changed since I received my education in journalistic ethics all those years ago,” Palin said. “But I’m not going to pick a fight with those who buy ink by the barrelful. I’m going to take those shots and those pop quizzes and just say that’s OK, those are good testing grounds.”

Most U.S. media critics dismissed the claim of unfairness, noting that a probing question about a policy issue doesn’t become a “gotcha” question just because the interview subject doesn’t know the answer. “Pressing the potential vice-president for details that might reveal the depth of her knowledge on the economy or foreign policy is not unethical,” said Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism think-tank in St Petersburg, Florida. “If anything, it is the exact opposite of unethical.”

Unable to name what she reads

Governor Palin is not the first candidate on a national ticket in the United States to have been a journalist. Warren Harding, President from 1921 until 1923, was editor of the Marion, Ohio, Daily Star before venturing into politics. (Harding assured the Star’s domination of the Marion newspaper market by marrying the daughter of a rival publisher.) Harding’s term as President was cut short by his death from a heart attack, allowing his vice-president, CalvinCoolidge, to succeed to the presidency.

Al Gore, vice-president from 1993 until 2001, and the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2000, also worked as a journalist during and after his military service in Vietnam. Gore was an investigative reporter from 1971 to 1976 at The Tennessean in Nashville, capital of the state that his father, Albert Gore Sr, represented in the U.S. Senate. A 1992 account of his time at The Tennessean praised him for “compiling an impressive record as a reporter and, incidentally, refocusing his life”. Among his accomplishments was a series of lengthy articles about apparent favouritism by city council members in votes on zoning issues. A council member was indicted for bribery but later acquitted. Gore’s last newspaper job was as an editorial writer. His father, interviewed in 1992 at the time the younger Gore was running for vice-president, observed that in that role, Albert Jr “had to inform himself about political matters, governmental matters, economics, the general scheme of American life”. In the process, he overcame “his aversion to political life”.

The senior Gore’s comments illustrate one of the primary ways in which the study of the practice of journalism might prepare aspiring politicians for public office: the curiosity about a myriad of public issues and the desire to right wrongs by calling attention to problems, which is at the heart of what was called “investigative journalism” in the 1970s and is now often described as “accountability journalism” (see Leonard Downie Jr’s essay in British Journalism Review, issue 19:3).

In what other ways might the attributes of a good journalist help a politician? Here are a few:

• The ability to sift through large volumes of information, evaluate the credibility of sources, and distil a complicated topic to its essence. The beat reporter’s task, to summarise a story quickly into a nutshell, is no different from an elected official’s need to get to the heart of a public policy issue.
  
  
• The ability to meet a deadline, which translates into an ability, quickly and concisely, to prepare talking points, a letter, speech or report.
  
  
• The ability to multi-task, a challenge familiar to reporters used to balancing one or more daily stories with long-term investigative projects. Senator Barack Obama described this trait when he scoffed at Senator McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign temporarily in late September to return to Washington, DC, in the wake of the collapse of several major financial institutions. “It’s going to be part of the President’s job to deal with more than one thing at once,” Obama said.
  
  
• The ability to ask questions in an interview at, for instance, a legislative committee. And someone used to conducting interviews should not be off-balance when the role is reversed. For example, Palin should not have been surprised by Couric’s follow-up questions that sought to move the conversation from the general to the specific.
  
  
• A commitment to accuracy in reporting, a willingness to admit mistakes and a commitment to set the record straight once an error is discovered. Sticking to the facts while avoiding exaggeration and distortion are as important for an elected official as they are for a journalist. However, some of the ways in which journalists fall short of the required benchmark have the potential to trip up Palin and other politicians. Local television news in the United States is often guilty of putting the frivolous ahead of the significant. In their propensity to focus on sensational, bizarre and scandalous titbits, local TV news programmes overlook or give scant attention to significant stories affecting the lives of their viewers. Similarly, politicians at all levels rely too much on slogans and sound-bites, rarely venturing into the substance of issues.