Two veteran political journalists came to Iowa State on Tuesday night to speak about the current presidential election and the state of the mainstream media.

Brian Cooper, Chamberlin/Iowa Newspaper Foundation fellow and executive editor of the Dubuque Telegraph Herald gave introductions of the speakers.

He told the story of the 2000 presidential election in which the first speaker, Sandy Johnson, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for The Associated Press, did not declare President Bush the winner even though others had.

“She was right. It took a Supreme Court decision to settle the matter in the following month,” he said.

Johnson later won an award for the decision.

She also talked about the current presidential race and offered some of her thoughts on the contest.

Although Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., is leading in the polls, Johnson said she doesn’t think she will necessarily win the nomination.

“She appears to be comfortably ahead nationally for now, some are even using the word ‘inevitable,'” Johnson said. “But the conventional wisdom can be wrong. At this point four years ago, everybody thought Howard Dean had Iowa locked up. And just two months ago, John McCain was near death; the pundits screwed up again.”

Johnson talked about the challenge Clinton faces with Iowa.

“She has to win Iowa, which has not been kind to women running for high office,” she said.

National political writer for Gannett News Service Chuck Raasch delivered a lecture focused on the mainstream media and the uniqueness of this presidential election.

Raasch cited a number of reasons why this election is unique, saying this election is the most important since 1988, when he first started covering presidential politics.

“Unless dramatic change occurs, this will be the first election since 1972 that takes place during an unpopular war,” he said. “Although I think the historic comparisons are more comparable to 1968.”

He said the election is in a time of an “acrimonious, unresolved debate about immigration.”

“Which is really a proxy debate for a broader definition of what it is to be an American,” he said.

Raasch said the financial troubles occurring in the mainstream media must not overshadow the importance of journalism to the public. He said the fate of the media and American people are “intertwined.”

“We must not forget, we must never forget the civic bottom line that [Benjamin] Franklin talked about,” he said.

Raasch also had wishes for the mainstream media, which included to “lead more, follow less,” “not to be so defensive,” as well as to change what it reports.

“Tone down the tabloidization. When did we become so cynical as to think that Americans wanted wall-to-wall coverage of the idle rich?” he said.