Description

When a candidate says something that is incorrect, pointing it out to the viewers isn't partisan, according to Campbell Brown, anchor of CNN's Campbell Brown: Election Center. "If I don't [point it out to my viewers], I'm insulting their intelligence, and I'm not comfortable with myself, because I'm ignoring something that is clearly factual and is staring me in the face," she says.

Transcript

Campbell: It’s fascinating to me and I think to all of us how much this has changed, political coverage has changed since 2004. I mean politico, political.com which is a huge source for me and I think a lot of political journalist now and it has been incredibly influential in this campaign didn’t exist in 2004. And now they’re breaking stories, I mean they are one of the certainly top five sites that I check every morning when I’m trying to prepare and do my homework. Blogging the internet has traumatically changed the way all of us do our jobs. I think our focus has been and remains accountability, trying to hold people accountable, be it political candidates or politicians or business leaders or who ever. I mean that sort of the prism that I look through when I’m trying to map up my show every day. Now I think in this we talk about this a lot in the panel, I think one thing has changed for me is the evolution of journalism toward taking a stronger point of view then you have seen in the past. For example, I often felt when I was a White House correspondent and I worked for NBC News at the time that there was an obsession with providing equal time for both sides which it isn’t always fair frankly. I feel my role is to try to be fair and to try to get to the truth and that means that if candidate A says its cloudy outside and candidate B says it’s sunny outside and I look out the window and I see its cloudy I should be able to say candidate A is right, candidate B is wrong and that’s not partisan, that’s not opinion, that’s just fact. As a journalist, I have fair amount on political reporting experience, I should be able to use that and should be able to discern when there is a debate and clearly one side is wrong I should be able to point that out to my viewers. If I don’t I’m insulting their intelligence and I’m not comfortable with my self because I’m ignoring something that is clearly factual an it’s staring me in the face. Male: How is media affecting the decision making process around this election? Campbell: Well first of all I see that you know I heard Rick give the statistics about young people not being as engaged, I think it was the third but what I’m encouraged by is the vast number of young people who are coming new to the process, because of who this candidates are. Now we can’t take credit for that certainly in the media, it’s not us. It is Don McCain, Barack Obama, Sarah Pailin and Drew Beynon. It is fascinating I think for a lot of people to have the first African-American presidential nominee, its fascinating to have a woman on a ticket for a lot of people. There is a, there’s just an excitement surrounding us, the fact that you don’t have a president running for r- election. You have two new Mavericks, I think you can call both of them Mavericks in their own way who are bringing something new and different to the process and people are engaged and excited in a way they haven’t been in a very long time. Also because of the problems facing this country right now we’re obviously in an economic crisis. We are fighting to war. To not be engaged in the process, you kind of have to have your head in the sand. To not be at least a little bit tuned in and so I think that explains the enormous numbers that we’re saying in terms of our viewership on cable, you know that the spike and readership that they’re saying in print and certainly you know in the internet.