Brandi Barhite had no specific plans for how to cover the inauguration of President George W. Bush. The BG News reporter had no tickets and no inside connections.
But the senior had the enthusiasm and ingenuity that so marks a successful student journalist. And she had the support of editorial adviser Bob Bortel, who agreed to pay the travel expenses for Barhite and chief reporter Craig Gifford to head to D.C. for the Jan. 20, 2001 inauguration.
It had been an unusual election season, with controversies surrounding “hanging chads,” a razor-thin Florida result and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that still reverberates to this day.
In the nation’s capital, Barhite and Gifford sought out Ohioans who were there to celebrate Bush’s inauguration and tried to get as close as they could to the Capitol building.
“Predictably, we didn’t get that close,” Barhite recalled in an email.
She now serves as director of enrollment communications at BGSU and is a member of The BG News Alumni Society Board.
“(T)he excitement and anger was palpable as I started to interview those who came to celebrate and those who came to jeer the president, who I could see way, way off in the distance,” she remembered.
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The Bee Gee News was only in its second year on campus when Warren Hardin was sworn into office. If the nascent publication covered the inauguration of the 29th president — the last Ohioan to become president — the available digital archives don’t show it.
In the century since, the newspaper has covered more than a dozen presidents. There was not much political coverage in the paper’s first few decades. The sparse coverage tended to relate to matters directly impacting the university.
For instance, an edition published two days after Herbert Hoover took office in 1929 paid greater attention to a debate at the Ohio Statehouse — whether or not to establish an arts course at BGSU.
Over time, the introduction of news wire services and an increasingly politicized environment on campus brought these national issues more frequently to The BG News’ pages.
The deaths of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy largely overshadowed coverage of the ascents of Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson.
From 1968 on, when Richard Nixon was inaugurated in more traditional fashion, The BG News has offered extensive coverage of each presidential transition of power.
The Jan. 20, 1977 edition included an editorial headlined “new era begins” (the paper preferred lower-cased typography on the opinion page back then) about the impending presidency of Jimmy Carter. The new president “should try to restore confidence and respectability in government” in the aftermath of Watergate, The BG News opined.
Associated Press coverage dominated the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, though a student columnist named Rosanne Darko offered a piece calling Reagan “the hope for the country.” When Reagan’s vice president was inaugurated as president eight years later, The BG News headline read, “Bush reflects Reagan image.”
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When all the festivities and interviews were over with, Barhite and Gifford headed back to Ohio. This being 2001, they had no means to turn in their stories through digital means. They drove all the way back to Bowling Green and filed their stories inside 210 West Hall.
The result was an edition printed on Jan. 22, 2001 with comprehensive coverage of the Bush inauguration. They filed six stories in all, with Barhite scoring three front-page articles.
She contributed a general write-up of the Bush oath of office; a roundup of BGSU College Republicans that witnessed the inauguration; and a recap of the protests in D.C. that day.
Gifford wrote about Bush’s inaugural speech, and the two wrote accompanying stories about a gathering of Ohioans (including Gov. Robert Taft) meeting that morning at a Virginia hotel.
“It was a great lesson in the value of localizing national news,” Barhite said, “but also finding meaningful stories among the strangers I interviewed as I wandered around the streets of DC.”
