A few thoughts about the president's visit

I didn't have much of an opportunity to evaluate the live coverage of President Bush's visit to Missouri Southern State University in Joplin Friday since I, like most other southwest Missourians, was working at the time.
Since it was something of a historic occasion for Joplin, many of the classes at South Middle School watched the coverage of the speech. Mine was only able to watch part of it since it began right at the start of our fifth hour and my class has the second lunch shift. My class went to lunch just as the president was preparing to shift his remarks toward national security and the war on terrorism.
After the lunch break, the students were in the computer lab and read from the Joplin Globe's coverage of the visit, then wrote their assessments. Reading through the papers, it appears that eighth graders are not too much different from the rest of us:
-They are tired of the barrage of negative advertising on both sides, but they do pay attention to it. All of them know who Jim Talent and Claire McCaskill are and many of them are also familiar with the advertising of the hotly contested Kansas race between Republican Rep. Jim Ryun and his challenger Nancy Boyda.
-The support for the president appears to be less among the students than it has been in the past and it all stems from the war in Iraq.
-Students almost unanimously agree that political speeches are boring.
-I was amazed by the preponderance of students who were irritated by the president's pronunciation of our state as Missourah. That is now how the state's name should be pronounced, several of them wrote.
-The students, with only a few exceptions, were extremely respectful of President Bush and Sen. Talent and though they may not be thrilled with Iraq, they lean toward re-electing the senator because they do not like the things they have heard about Claire McCaskill in the Talent ads.
***
As for media coverage, our local stations, as expected, took the responsible approach and offered live coverage. Though it was a routine political event in the grand scope of things, visits by a sitting president to Joplin are rare and should be offered extensive coverage.
I only had an opportunity to watch the news at 5 p.m. Unelss I missed something, and that's quite possible, KODE was the only one that sent an anchor to cover the story, including Brian Hamman on its on-the-spot coverage. I don't know that it makes any difference, but it is an approach that has worked in recent weeks for the station, especially with Tara Brown's coverage of the McDonald and Newton County sex cult stories.

After the initial barrage of coverage of the president's campaign stop for Sen. Talent, KOAM made a concerted effort to show coverage of the campaign of Talent's opponent, Claire McCaskill.

As expected, the local stations all offered coverage of the protesters.

KSNF naturally started its 5 p.m. newscast with banter between Gary Bandy and Tiffany Alaniz, though most of it was related to the visit, followed by the weather before buckling down to showing the work its reporters did covering the campaign stop.

From what I saw flipping back and forth between the stations, the reporters did their jobs well.