The blame game and the election of Scott Cohen

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan has offered a couple of understandable shots at the news media in the past week over the Scott Lee Cohen debacle.

Questioned about whether Democratic Party leaders should have done more to head off Cohen's primary victory in the lieutenant governor's race, a Madigan spokesman mused at the irony of being asked such a question by news people who tend to accuse the Democratic leadership of interfering too much in the election process.

Then on Tuesday, he acknowledged that both politicians and the media had failed to provide sufficient scrutiny on Cohen, adding that in the selection of a Cohen replacement for the general election, "I think that this time around that you people will be helpful in that regard."

I suspect the speaker is right about that. We'll all be more diligent about looking into the background of any hopeful who could find himself in the governor's office. At the same time, while acknowledging the sense of having let people down that many of us feel, I also am inclined to parry some of the blame against either the politicians or the news media.

It's easy to say in hindsight that we should have seen this coming and acted to head it off, but the truth is not that simple. For one thing, on the political side, Madigan's right. Cohen was a legitimate political candidate, pressing his own political agenda, and it was not for the political establishment to interfere with the process by sabotaging his candidacy - not that I'm so naive as to think political power brokers wouldn't have done that if they'd thought to.

And on our side, that of the media, the Cohen story emphasizes the anomaly that can appear simply because we have to apply some balance - both in terms of news judgment and of allocating our resources - in all our reporting.

To my knowledge, Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown was the only reporter to have written about Cohen's past legal problems prior to his election, but Brown himself has acknowledged what most of us felt throughout the campaign. Cohen seemed a fringe candidate for a political position that has no power to speak of and less public interest.

Of course, once he became the heir apparent to the potential next governor, Cohen's background became much more interesting to everyone, and we're all familiar with what ensued.

Sure, we all wish now that we'd done more to head off the Cohen "mistake," but let's not overlook the arrogance of that hindsight insight. From the tone of most public commentary now, it seems all but universally given that Cohen was patently unelectable and wouldn't have won if the media had just done its job. To that, I can only say that I know we could have done more to inform people about him and wish we had, but he's also not the first person of limited qualifications to buy an election.

Our shortcoming is in a failure to inform that, in this case, stemmed both from a preference to focus on candidates' positions rather than their private personal lives and from a need to concentrate our reporting resources where public interest and impact are most pronounced.

To be sure, as Madigan suggested, our radar will be much more finely tuned in the general election to come, but as I look for lessons for newspapers from the Cohen situation, I can't rush to the conclusion that we should be a conduit for every scurrilous campaign claim or the resource for the unsavory details of every candidate's divorce file.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor for the Daily Herald.