Al Diamon
Ask a Few More Questions
Campaign inane: The Bangor Daily News somehow believes it will help voters in Houlton decide who they want to elect as their state representative by informing them that independent candidate Stanley Ginish wants to reduce “wasteful programs,” “lower road weights” and “eliminate [the] new car windfall sales tax.”
Such information might be useful, if the newspaper included examples of programs Ginish considers wasteful, gave readers some clue as to the candidate’s reasoning on the road weight issue and explained just what the “new car windfall sales tax” is, because I suspect many people share my ignorance on that subject.
Unfortunately, the BDN’s brief profile of Ginish contains nothing more than an abbreviated rundown of his education, occupation, experience and a lot of difficult-to-interpret reasons he’s running. That’s because the brief item isn’t really a news story. It’s just a reprint of a short form the Bangor paper sent to all legislative candidates in its circulation area and asked them to fill out. The form doesn’t ask for specifics (Ginish’s Republican opponent, Mary DeAnne Rogan, said she’s running because “I feel God wants each of us to do our part to bring positive moral and economic changes to our government”), and it doesn’t demand explanations (Democratic incumbent Richard Cleary said he’s for “helping small business and better access to health care,” but he doesn’t say what he did to promote either of them in the Legislature).
As with all legislative candidates in northern Maine, the BDN conducted no interviews in the Houlton House race, asked no follow-up questions, performed no background checks. In short, it did nothing but publish whatever the candidates told it. And it didn’t even bother to put these anemic profiles on its Web site.
Of all Maine’s dailies, the Bangor Daily does the worst job of covering legislative races. The other papers at least go through the motions of contacting the candidates directly. While the state’s other papers don’t share the BDN’s apparent belief that potential legislators aren’t important enough to merit time with an actual journalist, they still exhibit some of the same lack of thoroughness, curiosity and context.
For example, there’s the Sept. 30 story in the Kennebec Journal on the candidates in House District 79 in the Augusta suburbs.
Republican hopeful Charles Jacques of West Gardiner is in favor of legalizing marijuana, abolishing county government and privatizing the Maine Turnpike, which ought to provide sufficient fodder for a decent story. Reporter Meghan Malloy made a perfunctory effort at reporting all this, but neglected to dig into Jacques’ background. If she had, she’d have discovered he’s a convicted felon, who claims he was framed for breaking and entering a Portland apartment in the early 1980s because he was trying to expose a plot by rogue law enforcement officials to cover up the murder of his sister.
Should this be a central issue in the campaign? That ought to be up to the voters, but they can’t make that decision if they aren’t given the facts. And the KJ can’t get the facts if it doesn’t take legislative coverage seriously enough to do some probing.
In general, the KJ and Sentinel have made an effort to provide some contrast between local pols. They’ve run Q &A pieces, giving candidates an opportunity to state their stands on taxes, energy and the economy. Unfortunately, when the answers aren’t clear, the papers haven’t done much to clarify them. In an Oct. 5 article, Democratic state Senate hopeful Diane Messer of Liberty dodged a question about changes in the state income or sales tax by saying, “I believe there is much room for improvement to our income tax and sales tax plans.” Who doesn’t?
There’s also the matter of ignoring history. In an Oct. 6 piece on the Senate District 24 race, KJ reporter Susan Cover neglects to mention that GOP candidate Kim Davis, a former House member, lost her seat two years ago after she refusing to take part in newspaper interviews or attend public forums.
Davis’ odd tactics were reported by the KJ at the time, but the public might have appreciated a follow-up question or two on why their then-representative behaved so oddly and whether she intends to do so again.
But too much of the Portland paper’s legislative coverage is devoted to generalizations. Democratic incumbent Barry Hobbins of Saco can “hit the ground running.”
GOP state Sen. Jonathan Courtney of Sanford wants “to improve the economic climate for Maine families.”
Come on, stop wasting ink on blather. There must be dozens of issues out there on which candidates ought to have clear positions, from abortion to immigration to waste-water treatment.
Get specific.
Get pushy.
Get the real story.
The idea is to help people vote.
Electoral division: The Maine Sunday Telegram has at least one editor who doesn’t understand how Maine splits its electoral votes. That’s obvious from the sub-headline on the front page of the Oct. 5 edition that read in part, “McCain looking to win at least two electoral votes here.”
In a two-way race, Maine can’t divide its four electoral votes so that any candidate gets two. The state awards one vote to the winner of each congressional district and two to the statewide winner. That allows 4-0 or 3-1 splits, but not a 2-2 tie. A refresher course on all this might be in order before election night.
We’re great: The Lewiston Sun Journal got carried away with its coverage of itself on Oct. 5. The Sun Journal devoted nearly a full page of its shrinking news hole to a gushing piece by news editor Mark Mogensen on the 25th anniversary of the debut of its Sunday edition.
Whether the paper, the first in Maine to use extensive color, was ever “Groundbreaking” (as the headline described it) is debatable, but there’s little question that these days, it rarely pushes the envelope. Why that is might make a much better Sunday feature than this one.
It’s difficult to figure who would want to read so much about such an obscure anniversary, besides Sun Journal publisher Jim Costello, who’s the subject of a sidebar piece and is extensively quoted in the main story.
Probably just answered my own question.
Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
Posted on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 in Permalink
Views expressed in this blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect either Down East's editorial stance or the views of Down East Enterprise. We ask that comments be civil; anyone who refuses to self edit runs the risk of being banned from commenting on Down East.com content. Further, please limit material cited from other publications to fewer than 75 words and a link; anything more riles copyright attorneys.
Reader Comments:
You're right about election coverage. I want people in Bangor to remember the Hollywood Slots fiasco of a couple of years ago -- and each of the Bangor/Orono state legislators' role in it. Many of them are up for re-election. One legislator said, at the Saturday morning meeting to save the racino, that the public outcry was the result of what happens when discussions are held in public and not in private. Hello? You're a legislator! And you wanted to change a business's tax rate? That is public business! And you want voters to return you to the Legislature?
Just a thought...
Right. Because state legislators can make a real impact on immigration and abortion laws. Spot on.
If it was the BDN itself who asked about "new car windfall sales tax" as one issue of concern they wanted each candidate to address, might the reason for the question be driven (pun intended) by the large car dealers who heavily advertise in their paper ?
Al, you've got a lot of nerve taking anyone to task for failing to ask tough questions. You were a lead reporter for one of the most respected and better financed radio news operations in the state when my sister was murdered. When she was found beaten and soon thereafter died, you did a good piece the next day about the murder. The day after, when local anti-violence against women advocates held a candlelight vigil in her honor, you also did a fine bit of reporting on the ongoing investigation and the vigil. Two days later, however, when the Portland Police Department handed out a xeroxed press release announcing that her death wasn't a murder after all, but rather, a tragic accident and that they had the responsible person in custody, your "reporting" was limited to reading the release almost verbatim as if it were all established fact. The FACT that the release announcing the case was solved had holes in the story big enough to drive a truck through and contradicted information on the case and the crime scene that the police had released as recently as 72 hours earlier somehow didn't pique your journalistic instincts or inspire you to ask anything like the probing questions that you now take Malloy to task for not asking. You slam Malloy for "perfunctory" reporting, but your reporting on the murder of my sister - a considerably more life and death issue than a legislative race that nobody, myself included, feels I have a chance of winning - was worse than perfunctory. It was non-existant. You were working the police beat and you not only didn't ask the hard questions, you didn't ask any questions at all. More astoundingly, when the fall guy the Portland Police had set up to take the heat for the officers who beat my sister to death was sentenced, you didn't report the story at all. You certainly didn't ask any "tough" questions: not about the unbelievably light sentence this man was getting for supposedly orphaning two children, not about the fact that at the time of his arrest he was holding sale weight cocaine for which he was never charged, not about the judge who was so indifferent to the "victim impact statement" that he interrupted family members five times because he wasn't even aware they hadn't finished speaking and certainly not about the confrontation between myself and an Assistant Attorney general outside the court room before the sentencing in which he dismissed my calls to continue the case and investigate possible police involvement in nanette's death by saying that "(your) sister's life isn't worth tarnishing the reputation of a respectable police department..."
When you and I talked about this on the phone and you suggested malloy should have been more probing, I pointed out that the question never came up because it was never relevant in the discussion we were having on issues in the here and now, as opposed to a quarter century old tragedy you feel justified in dragging up. I told you - which you fail to point out - that in discussing my stance on pot legalization that Malloy has asked me if I had ever had a problem with the law around drug laws and I told her - truthfully - that I did not and that I had never used pot at all, that I opposed prohibition II on principle. I didn't conceal my background, it just wasn't relevant to the question at hand and she didn't question it further, because she had no reasonable reason to do so. You suggest that she should have been more probing. How exactly, Al? Should she run an equifax report on all the candidates that she talks to? She also didn't ask me how many times I've been married, do I pay child support on time, my religious affiliation, my sexual orientation or any number of other questions that she could have. Absent any reasonable reason to press the issue, why would she have? Oh, because the great Journalism sage Al D would have? In our pre-post prep phone call you told me that this is a question that should be asked of any candidate and that you yourself ask of every candidate that you talk to. Aside from the fact that I know that not to be true from my own experience (you didn't ask me that question in 1979 when you first interviewed me) I also did a little fact checking of my own. I haven't been able to find a single candidate for public office that has been interviewed by you who can ever recall having been asked any such question. I stopped at eight, figuring that had pretty much made my point.
What a hypocrite, holding your peers to a standard your own work doesn't validate. There's a saying I like. "You have to qualify to critize." You clearly don't, Al. When you were working the police beat in Portland, you were little more than a media lap dog for the Portland PD.
One wonders what your motive might be for dredging all this up. After all, whether you believe me or not when I say that I didn't commit the crime for which I was arrested (I didn't, for the record) or that I got a trial so rigged and hamstrung that the words "fair trial" can't possibly be used with a straight face (and I did, for the record) the fact is all this happened a quarter century ago. Whatever happened to the idea that you pay your debt to society and you move on with your life? One suspects that this is a two decade old hand grenade that you've lobbed into the coverage of the race because of your well established contempt for Libertarian political views and your bias towards tax and spend liberals like my opponent. I personally think it is little more than professional jealousy, a chance to spring a "gotcha" on a fellow member of the fourth estate who works for a mass circulation paper of record in the Capital area while your contribution to journalism thereabouts is a political column in a weekly newspaper few people in the service area even knows exist, yet alone read. Whatever my differences with you over the years Al, I've always respected your sense of fair play, but this obvious play to the fears, loathing and prejudices of voters in my district (after all, felons are the only sub-group of people that one can legally discriminate against anymore) is deplorable. Perhaps when this "journalistic" gig dries up on you, as all your others have, you can get work writing press releases for the Klan or some other hate group.
You're incredible, you know that? You bash the press for not pressing candidates on issues of substance. Malloy writes a piece that does exactly that, drawing a candidate out discussing issues that are incredibly substantive and the best you can do is slam her for not asking a question you think she should ask (for no better reason than you - supposedly - would have)? You than go on to criticize reporters for speaking in generalizations, while bitching that Malloy failed to engage in the worst type of generalization - slapping a two word label on someone that would serve to so fully define them in most folks minds that nothing else they had to say would ever be listened to. Jesus, Al, pick one.
Like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, I believed in justice so passionately that I was willing to do whatever it took to see it achieved, even if it meant, as it did, ultimately giving up my freedom. Before and since, I've had lived with death threats from rogue cops precisely because I continued to insist that justice be done. Like Mandela and King, I was, in fact, a political prisoner. I make no apologies for that. However, I refuse to let injustice run my life. I'm running for the legislature because there are problems in this state that need to be solved and I think I have some of the answers and certainly more than my opponent. I'm spending my campaign talking about those problems and those solutions and the future of this state and you think the most important question that a local reporter should have asked me is about a past tragedy with no bearing on anything that this campaign is even about? Amazing. Believe me - as you know yourself from your own experience - I'm more than willing to talk to anyone who is interested about the circumstances of a quarter century ago. If anyone is interested, buy me a drink or a piece of pie and let's sit and chat. But for heaven's sake, as a journalist of long practice, don't even begin to pretend that an issue this old, this complicated can be done justice in the confines of a twenty paragraph piece on a local house race. To pretend otherwise, as you do here, is insulting to the intelligence of your readers. And you know, Al, before this, that's a crime that I would never have accused you of.
Charles Jacques, West Gardiner