Miami Herald Highlights Candidates’ Personal Lives, Not Professional Credentials
Last week, the Miami Herald published an article about the upcoming race for Miami’s District 2 Commissioner, in which four candidates are challenging incumbent Commissioner Marc Sarnoff. Author Charles Rabin gives brief backgrounds on each of the challengers—but instead of focusing on their professional qualifications for the position, he highlights their personal lives instead.
The way the Miami Herald describes the candidates, voters must really be having a tough time deciding who to elect this November. Should they choose the “transgender single mom [who] has two grownup sons who call her dad,” the woman who “lives on a 40-foot boat…[and is] single with no children,” the woman who is a “married Harvard graduate with a grown son,” or the man who is “married with eight children?”
The answer, of course, is none of the above. Miamians should cast their vote based on who they think is most qualified for the job, not based on how many children a candidate may or may not have. And the Miami Herald should cover the race in the same way—by focusing on the real issues at hand, not irrelevant details from candidates’ personal lives.
Making matters worse is the fact that an earlier version of the article that was posted online but did not go to print discussed the personal life of only one candidate, Michelle Niemeyer. The current version has been edited to add in language about the familial status of the other challengers—which makes the Herald’s coverage more equal, but no more pertinent to the race. Furthermore, there’s not a single sentence in the article that states whether or not Commissioner Sarnoff himself is married or has children.
This kind of coverage is irrelevant to the race, unfair to the candidates, and unfair to the voters. If a candidate chooses to highlight their time as a spouse or parent, that’s their prerogative. But if a candidate doesn’t consider those experiences to be qualifications for the job, neither should the media. That’s just plain sexist.