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After two primaries and a runoff, the race for the Sixth Congressional District is finally over, and Democrat Don Cazayoux is headed to Washington, D.C., to represent the Baton Rouge area. His 49%-46% victory came despite being targeted by runner-up Woody Jenkins, the National Republican Party and local businessman Lane Grigsby.

The GOP went for the jugular with a series of nasty fliers that described Cazayoux as more corrupt than Edwin Edwards. That’s about the worst claim you can level at a Louisiana politician these days.

Grigsby’s campaign wasn’t quite so mean-spirited, but still hit hard. He hired veteran political consultant George Kennedy to produce attack ads that pointed out discrepancies between Cazayoux’s claim to be a moderate and his supposedly liberal voting record.

This wasn’t Grigsby’s first foray into the political arena. It was, perhaps, his most mystifying. His anybody-but-Cazayoux approach was, by default, a pro-Jenkins campaign. Instead of promoting the conservative newspaper publisher and former state legislator, however, Grigsby’s CazayouxTruth.org Web site did nothing but bash Cazayoux.

Grigsby wrote on his site that his purpose was to keep voters “truly informed,” even though he encouraged them to vote their hearts. Studies have shown that kind of approach can be an effective tactic. When voters are exposed to too much negative information about a candidate, they tend to stay home. That might have been why only 23% of the district’s voters turned out to cast a ballot.

But neither the efforts of Grigsby, which cost nearly $308,000, nor those of the GOP managed to create enough doubt in the minds of voters to keep an additional 4% home, which is what Jenkins needed to win. That suggests that the Democrats did a better job of getting out the vote, the Republicans fielded an unpopular candidate with a lot of baggage and, perhaps, that voters are savvier than they are given credit.

Sweeps stakes

It’s sweeps month again, which means local news stations have been promoting special reports in an effort to gain points in the Nielsen ratings. NBC affiliate WVLA-TV and its sister station, Fox affiliate WGMB-TV, sent a crew to Iraq to trail the 165th Mechanized Division of the Louisiana National Guard and give viewers an up-close glimpse of daily life for local troops stationed there.

For two weeks, David D’Aquin, who joined the station late last year, and freelance photographer Eric Breaux filed reports from the field, though the first couple of broadcasts came from inside the relative safety of the bunker near Baghdad where they were temporary stationed. Heavy fighting prevented the crew from getting to the actual base where they were to be embedded with the 165th, which led to some fairly lackluster reports early in the week.

Whether that could have been helped is unknown. On the plus side, the reports improved as the series progressed, and D’Aquin did a good job of keeping the clichés to a minimum and resisting the temptation to overdramatize, which many cub reporters would have done.

Station executives say the series was never supposed to show the dramatic side of war through the eyes of a breathless reporter and the lens of a shaky camera, but was intended to give a distinctly Louisiana perspective to the war in Iraq.

“Our purpose is to tell the story of the local soldiers,” says Phil Waterman, who runs WVLA and WGMB. “Where do they eat? Where do they sleep? What do their bunkers look like?”

Waterman won’t say how much the trip cost except that it was in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s a lot, though several of the parent company’s other stations—including those in Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and several Texas cities—picked up the reports. That means they got to promote them and sell off of them as well.

Whether it will make much of a difference in terms of ratings is questionable. Both stations have languished in the ratings game since they launched nightly newscasts last year. But Waterman says the stations had a larger purpose in undertaking the ambitious project, namely trying to establish their news operation as one that is credible and in the local market for the long haul.

“We want people to tune in and recognize our news for the quality product it is,” Waterman says. “We want the ratings, yes, but we also want to deliver a quality news product.”