Journalists Search for News Hook From Bernanke Hearings

Considering that the Federal Reserve chairman is often called the second most powerful person in Washington, Tuesday's Senate hearing for Ben Bernanke, President Bush's nominee for the position, should have been a huge story that draws public attention.

Instead business reporters who covered the hearing said they were challenged in trying to find an angle that would be both newsworthy and interesting to the public.

Bernanke was nominated nearly three weeks prior to the hearings and, reports said, was a shoo-in to be approved. Thus, much had already been written about him, forcing reporters to file through hours of hearing notes on Tuesday and quickly pick one or two issues on which to write short, concise pieces.

For Marilyn Geewax, the issue was Bernanke's inflation target proposal -- an idea opposed by outgoing Chairman Alan Greenspan.

"I wanted to focus on what was the conflict," says Geewax, national economics reporter for Cox Newspapers. "It's the change. So that's what I focused on.

"I was looking for what my readers don't know. Bernanke was the status quo and [mostly] nothing's going to change. That's a boring news story. As a reporter, you're looking for 'what's the new news story here?' "

Although she centered her hearing piece on a policy idea, Geewax sought to make her earlier Bernanke coverage story relevant to the average reader -- not the average business section reader.

In her Oct. 25 piece about Bush's nomination of Bernanke, Geewax explained the importance of the Fed chairman in a paragraph midway through.

"I tried to get that up pretty high" in the story, she says. By setting interest rates, among other key duties, "the Federal Reserve affects your life more than anything out of Washington."

Kevin G. Hall, an economics reporter for Knight Ridder Washington, employed a different approach to gauge readers. In his piece on the hearing, Hall focused on Bernanke's comments regarding Social Security and his promise not to allow politics to influence his decisions.

Hall says he gave minimal space to the inflation target news because it was widely reported. Bernanke's view on Social Security, on the other hand, is "an issue that's very important that I don't think that a lot of people picked up on," he says.

One thing that many reporters did pick up on was the need to "humanize" Bernanke, as Hall put it. Knight Ridder Washington and The Washington Post, for example, recently ran lengthy profiles of Bernanke.

The Post ran its piece, by economic reporters Ben White and Nell Henderson, the day of the hearing because "we assumed he'd be confirmed," White says.

White spent a day in Princeton, N.J., talking to Bernanke's former colleagues and friends, and contacted many others by phone from his New York office. It was important to do that story, he says, because reporters need to get to know both the nominee and sources who can talk about him -- as does the public.

"He's going to be a big figure in Washington for several years to come," White says.

During the hearing, meanwhile, reporters listened beyond the testimony noting how Bernanke interacted with senators. He verbally sparred with Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) and deferred some economic issues to Congress' authority.

Hall noted those tidbits in his piece because, he says, they exhibited signs of novice behavior and another departure from Greenspan, respectively.

But most of the time Bernanke was nonconfrontational, Geewax says, which made reporters' jobs tougher -- that and the fact that they could not watch his body language as he responded to questions.

"One of the great tragedies of covering hearings in Washington is that the press is actually plastered against the wall and can't see anything," says Geewax, who could only glimpse the back of Bernanke's head.

"He's known as a conciliatory guy," Geewax adds. "If there had been any evidence to the contrary, I would have led with that."

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism