Campaign Audio from PRX

Back again with health care resources for Texas. (Ohio NDs should scroll down a bit).

Health care policy is a central issue in the Democratic primary this year, especially in Texas which as one of the highest uninsured rates in the country. To help cover the issue, PRX has some pre-game for programmers in Texas:

SERIES: Barack Obama Addresses Health Care

SERIES: Hillary Clinton Addresses Health Care

These two collections pull together and organize audio from the candidates in order to help stations parse the main policy differences. Newsrooms of all sizes can work this audio into their newscast in a number of ways. Here’s some thoughts:

1. Audio to hang vox around for a pulse of Texas package
2. Bumpers or conversation starters for call-in shows
3. Promos for election night coverage
4. Reporter packages that analyze the issues facing Texans

If this last one is for you, I have some more resources to help out:

• Texas has almost six million uninsured people who increase premiums for insured Texans by more than $1500 a year. So says the Texas Health Institute in their report A Vision for Change: Policy Solutions for Increasing Health Coverage in Texas. THI is a non-partisan research center that is not making endorsements and is happy to give interviews to the press. Camille Miller can be reached at 512-279-3904 or cmiller@texashealthinstitute.org.

• Anne Dunkelberg helps run the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin which has a number of Texas related health links here. She is best reached through the press officer Lynsey Kluever at 512-320-0222, ext. 112 or at dunkelberg@cppp.org.

• Lastly, Rae Lynn Mitchell runs press for Texas A&M’s School of Rural Public Health and has a dozen or so different researchers versed in public health policy who can speak generally about each candidate’s health care plan as it relates to rural Texas. Rae Lynn can be reached at 979-862-2419 or rlmitchell@srph.tamhsc.edu. NOTE: reporters should know the school’s dean is a longtime Clinton pal and worked in President Clinton’s administration.

Happy hunting!

This weary election curator went without health insurance a few years after college. A cut on the back of my hand cost some $600 dollars. A headache in 2001 went for a whopping $1200!

But lo, here come our benevolent politicians to punt around what will undoubtedly become a major issue this election season. To help PRX, has some pre-game for programmers in Ohio (Texas coming soon):

SERIES: Barack Obama Addresses Health Care

SERIES: Hillary Clinton Addresses Health Care

These two collections pull together and organize audio from the candidates in order to help stations parse the main policy differences. Newsrooms of all sizes can work this audio into their newscast in a number of ways. Here’s some thoughts:

1. Audio to hang vox around for a pulse of Ohio package
2. Bumpers or conversation starters for call-in shows
3. Promos for the debate or election night coverage
4. Reporter packages that analyze the issues facing Ohioans.

If this last one is for you, I have some more tidbits. Ohio spent $3.6 billion in 2006 on medical care for the uninsured. This comes from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio and their report Mapping Health Spending and Insurance Coverage in Ohio. There’s enough data in this report for an enterprising reporter to dig down and come up with something good this week.

Want more?

How about county-level data on the uninsured here. This also comes from HPIO and can give your listeners a feel for the number of uninsured in their county.

For sources who can provide thoughtful insight into how the health care debate affects Ohioans, I’ve screened these two and recommend them both:

• Jason Sanford, spokesmen for the Health Policy Institute of Ohio (jsanford@healthpolicyohio.org). Sanford is better than the average press officer. He’s knowledgeable about Clinton’s and Obama’s health plans and has good and bad things to say about both. He makes no endorsement and has never donated to a political campaign (I checked).

• Nancy Cooper (coopern@ohio.edu) is the Program Coordinator for Ohio University’s Health Policy Fellowship (she runs the fellowship and supervises the research in health policy). She’s well informed and also is also not making endorsements (though she shows up in the FEC database as donating to Ronald Reagan).

My last tip: the Plain-Dealer is running their health-care story on Saturday. Still time to beat them!

Michael Leland’s reporters had everything in place until the rain came. Then the ice. Then the snow. On Sunday night before the primary Wisconsin Public Radio’s News Director was at home on the phone with his reporters all over the state to see who could dig out and cover what.

“It was the most frustrating night of the primary. We had three reporters ready to cover things. There was a lot of scrambling to get people around. We had an inch and a half of rain that froze overnight. Then by midday it started snowing.”

Events were rescheduled, candidates didn’t show up, but all together things came together.

“For us the key for us was having reporters who have been through it before … especially on Sunday when things started falling apart. Just being flexible and having good people on the ground.”

Leland adds:”They really took the lead in keeping me informed as to what was on and what was off.”

In addition to posting raw audio to PRX, Leland used his nine reporters scattered over the state to produce nearly 40 election related stories over 11 days: 30 1:00+ wraps, three 3:30 features, and a four-part issue series that ran Tuesday-Friday the week before the primary. The series (which looked at Iraq, Health Care, Jobs, and Energy) used tape from stake-holders, local university professors, and other non-profit leaders.

What WPR’s issues series didn’t have a lot of was actual tape from the candidates talking about the issues. Two days after the primary Leland looked at what we at PRX are putting together and said it could have been a good resource had he know about it (especially the recent package on Clinton’s health plan).

Aside from weather, another of Leland’s main struggles in covering the election so close to home was working in blind tandem with NPR.

“The one challenge we had in dealing with a major national story was how the network was covering it. So we tried to keep to local issues important to the state. And we ended up trying to anticipate what the network would run because you have the issue that a [local] reporter piece would run just after a national piece.”

Overall, Leland is very happy with his reporters and thinks his listeners were better informed because of their hard work. If he had to name a disappointment? The candidates. They split town before the results were in.

“After all this coverage we did, we were at all the election watch party, but the candidates had moved on by then. It would have been great to have the victory speeches.”

Lots of good reporting shows very little substantive policy differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So why does Obama now have nine primary victories in a row? Just listen to the differences in pacing in their speeches. Here is Hillary Clinton in San Antonio, and it sounds like she doesn’t pause enough to get applause from the crowds and build momentum. She speaks in sentences, not phrases that have rhythm. But Barack Obama, who gives pretty much the same speech time and again, has those pauses and builds momentum down. 

Foreign policy matters in ’08. It’s easy to tell because opinion polls for US candidates are popping up in France, Germany , and now Uganda.Wondering how to cover it at your station? Check out Feet in 2 Worlds which begun a new series about views on the American election through the eyes of immigrant groups in the US. Here is one of three raw conversations between Russian Ari Kagan and Pakistani Jehangir Khattak.Looking for more from the candidates talking all things foreign? Here’s a quick list:Obama gives major foreign policy speechMcCain talks Iraq in Concord, NHMike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton on NHPR’s The ExchangeThere’s more foreign policy audio here.

A long time ago political campaigning centered around buttons. Snappy slogans stamped in mass and handed out by the candidates or their campaign mascots. Well-heeled campaigns turned those slogans into hokey jingles that sang the praises of politicians. We don’t really have that any more. Instead we have us, the MSM.

Most of my friends today resent election politicking as partisan pandering for the 20% of Americans who vote irrespective of political party. But even with our 8 second sound bites and horse race journalism, there’s a valid argument that we live in the most democratic era of US history. Not in my lifetime has there been so many forums in which presidential hopefuls can speak to the public (Here, of all things, Ron Paul’s interview with NORMAL is blast worldwide all so Americans can make an informed decision about who they want for president).

In this, PRX and Campaign Audio (RSS) are here to help. By curating and promoting raw audio from the election, news producers have easy access to material that can help their audience understand who and what they are voting for.

To get started, check out the audio collection underway here. For a more targeted search you might want to check here and navigate the tags on the right.

One of the advantages of listening to raw audio from the candidates is that it isn’t all rehashed rhetoric at every stop. Take, for examples, this speech from Republican Senator John McCain in Seattle on February 8th, provided by KUOW. In it, after the Reagan references, the senator says something I have not heard anywhere in the mainstream press. He says he wants ALL veterans to have a medical card that will give them federally-paid medical care from any physician of their choice, not just at VA hospitals.