During this election year one of the most critical assignments for political reporters is to grill candidates who are running for this office or that. After all if they don’t ask issue questions, how will a hapless voter have enough information to pick the most qualified office seeker?

That’s why it was so disheartening the other day to see this journalistic responsibility was ignored.

GOP U.S. Senate candidate John James and Democratic candidate for governor Gretchen Whitmer staged a media event to show they gathered enough petition signatures to gain a spot on the August primary ballot.

It’s obviously a life or death story for the candidates but let’s be clear, for the typical voter it’s a ho-hum event worthy of about one paragraph in the paper.

But as it turns out Mr. James and the Democratic frontrunner for governor actually made news during the scrum that followed the filing of the petitions. But not one of the major media outlets reported one word.

You be the judge and ask yourself after you read the following, if you found the following information useful in evaluating the two candidates.

Senate candidate James brags about having served from the “battlefield to the boardroom” as he touts eight years in the Army and a number of years running his own business.

Given his battlefield expertise, he was expected to knock this question out of the park.

Not quite.

“Would you bomb Syria?”

“I believe by having Ambassador Bolten giving our … Ambassador Haley, I’m sorry, Nicki Haley at, ah, the U.N. to advise our president, making sure that we, we have to, so, by taking this …

It’s a good guess that at this tortured spot in his “answer,” he is thinking, “when you are digging a hole, stop digging.” And he did.

In mid stream he doubled back in search of a clearer response: “Let me step back here because this is a very complicated issue.”

Now if this candidate had been a bricklayer or a desk jockey of some sort, you might be willing to cut him some slack for his obtuse response. But he asserts he’s been battlefield tested but there he was fumbling around for a response to not only a timely question but an important one for voters.

Eventually a minute or two, he finally landed on a response which was cogent. “I would not oppose limiting any of our United State’s, ah, options.” He said the Syrian leader must be held accountable “for gassing children, so we must use every remedy at our disposal.”

The fact that he did not say that from the outset is not a capital offense but it was a self-imposed battlefield wound that an opponent could exploit.

But neither his opponent nor the voters knew this had happened because nobody in the press corps bothered to report it.

Ms. Whitmer, for her part, has been in the news criticizing her alma mater for its handing of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse matter and was among the first to call for the ouster of former MSU president Dr. Lou Anna Simon. And along with other politicians reacting to this story she reaffirmed that this had to be about the survivors.

Turns out those survivors are embroiled in a legislative debate to pass a 10-bill anti-Larry Nassar package of bills to “make sure this never happens again.”

And while it breezed through the Senate, various factions, for weeks, have been criticizing aspects of the package suggesting that perhaps parts of it are unconstitutional.

It was assumed that the former Senate Democratic leader was tuned in to all this coverage, but when asked if there were flaws in the proposal, she demurred.

“I’d have to study it to give you an opinion, a legal opinion,” she avoided a direct response.

Should she have known more about that?

Was she afraid that if she criticized the bills, it might cost her support from the survivors?

Voters will never be able to answer those questions, because nobody in the MSM bothered to report that either. Leaving the press corps zero for two on doing its due diligence on behalf of the readers they serve.

One reporter, however, did report that “dancing supporters” of Ms. Whitmer helped her turn in the signatures.

And when voters pick the next governor, that will surely be important in their final decision. As for the other stuff she and the guy with two first names uttered on two critical issues, unless voters read this article, they would never know what they said and how they said it.