Despite extensive promotion in the newspaper and on the radio, our recent series of public candidate forums drew small crowds.
The best attended of the four 7 p.m. forums was the Oct. 7 event featuring the eight candidates for local state representative in Districts 35, 36 and 37, respectively.
About 175 people attended that one, and they got their money’s worth (OK, so admission was free.), primarily because of the passionate speeches of the Libertarian candidates and the interesting responses of the incumbents.
While the presidential election is garnering a ton of interest and promises to set some records for turnout in Indiana and across the nation, folks just don’t seem that interested in the local elections.
Just over 100 showed up for our congressional candidate forum last Tuesday. And I was told by an aide of one of the candidates that it was the largest crowd he had seen for a District 6 forum during the past four years.
That’s a sad statement.
Why do these forums draw such small crowds? Well, it probably has something to do with entertainment value.
Frankly, many of the candidates just are not very exciting to watch or listen to. They tend to talk in monotone generalities. Politicians have discovered this is often the best way to get elected or re-elected. We had several cases where underdog challengers were strangely restrained in their criticism of the incumbent.
The Herald Bulletin and WHBU radio, co-sponsors of the forum, have to take a little fault for how bland the forums generally were.
We’ll try to develop a format the next time we host forums (2010) that encourages more actual debate than prepared statements.
Looking a bit deeper, another reason for low forum attendance is the pace of modern life. Even folks who are interested in politics have school functions, second-shift jobs, family commitments, must-see TV, evening meetings and other conflicts.
Would I attend these forums if I weren’t a community journalist? I’d like to think so, but I have to confess that in the planning of them, I took a hard look at my schedule and selected dates that would work into it.
At any rate, the forums reached much farther than the audience that attended. Leland Franklin broadcast them live on WHBU, and thousands of folks read about them on our Web site (www.theheraldbulletin.com) or in the next morning’s print edition of The Herald Bulletin.
We elected to write about the forums in a nontraditional format, breaking the articles into chunks dealing with specific issues such as economic development, energy, health care and government finance. The goal was to make it easy for readers to find where candidates stand on certain matters, and I heard from a few readers who liked our format.
How could we make candidate forums and our political reporting more appealing and relevant? Let me know what you think.
Scott Underwood is managing editor of The Herald Bulletin. His column in published Mondays.
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SCOTT UNDERWOOD: Forum series attendance disappointing
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