We have critiqued this coverage as it's aired. The Iowa caucus was covered in "TV: The misguided Water Cooler Set," the New Hampshire primary was covered in "TV: The head scratchers" and the South Carolina primary was covered in "Media: The uninformed boosting ad revenues."
Last Sunday when the South Carolina coverage went up, we began hearing complaints from NPR friends. In the lead up to the primary, Morning Edition and All Things Considered had both featured female voters being interviewed in the daily broadcasts. And while, yes, this should always happen, no, it had not happened with two contests that came before. It was a noticeable and welcome change and one that lived up to NPR's diversity mandate.
We applaud both shows for the coverage they did. On one phone call after another, we repeatedly explained that the efforts were not noted because we weren't covering those two programs. We were covering the live coverage. We further explained that we had planned to review ABC's Revenge, to review it in a creative essay in which we injected ourselves into the review. That we'd done an outline Sunday morning only to have Jim tell us that we had to ("HAD to") cover the South Carolina live coverage NPR offered.
That wasn't our plan. We had each caught at least half the coverage. We didn't take notes. We weren't planning on writing anything about it. But Jim's argument was we had set a pattern. Our argument was (a) we make no promises ahead of time about what we'll cover (we made one on Fringe and ended up having to extend the life of this site as a result -- we were going to slam Fringe for its lack of female characters when a friend with the show asked if we could wait because they were adding more female characters, we agreed to forgetting that the site was supposed to go dark) and (b) if we established a pattern it was for critiquing the Tuesday live coverage.
But we agreed to do something on the South Carolina live coverage.
It was written quickly and under duress.
And while the piece did not include (and was not supposed to include) commentary on Morning Edition or All Things Considered, we will note -- even gladly note -- right now that the two programs did a strong job of being inclusive while covering the lead up to the South Carolina primary.