Otterblog

A few months ago, I wrote about the disagreement the Journal was having with Rep. Virginia Foxx.

The quick recap is that she took issue with our reporting and then refused to speak directly with any reporters at the Journal. At the time, I discussed our paper’s policy on dealing with public officials and how we work to resolve these situations: in short, we correct our errors where we are wrong, stick up for our journalists when we feel we are correct, and we try to confront problems honestly and openly.

Anyway, careful readers of the Journal would see a quote from Rep. Foxx in a story published this morning about student loan changes.

It’s easy to read all sorts of motives/reasons into Rep. Foxx’s change: The GOP is no longer in the majority. Her maturity as a second-term member of Congress. Her ability to forgive a perceived unjustice. The difficulty/foolishness of carrying grudges. The idea that she has punished us enough.  I don’t know, and in a larger sense, I don’t care. To me, the reasons are not important. It’s the ends, not the means. What mattered then and what matters now is the ability of our reporters to have reasonable access to our elected officials so we can inform our readers.

Humorist is a word that is widely overused and very misunderstood. Being funny is hard work. Being funny for years and years is even harder. Art Buchwald did it well. He died yesterday. If you have a chance, go find one of his books and read a few columns. Good stuff.

We had a good debate this afternoon about a story running on the wires about a conference in Iran that is a collection of Holocaust deniers. Yes, there are people out there in the world who continue to insist that this tragedy never took place. This story, published electronically, and soon to be published the old-fashioned way in many newspapers, raises good questions about the limits of objectivity and the idea of balancing different beliefs.

The debate focused about whether a story on a bunch of holocaust deniers—including David Duke—ought to run anywhere. Point being, the standard narrative of journalism frequently has person A saying one thing, and person B saying another. Often, the sense of weight or proportionality gets lost, and you’re left with an on the one hand, on the other approach that fails to recognize the intellectual, scientific or historical imbalance of the arguments.

My guess is that if this conference was in Singapore or Barcelona, we would kill it. But it’s in Iran, which has been singled out—along with Syria—by the Iraq Study Group as our new partners of sorts in finding a solution for war in Iraq. It was organized by the president of Iran, and it indicates who we will be dealing with in the months ahead.

Making a list: The AP this time of year sends out its lists of top news stories for the state and the nation and the world. If you’ve got ideas for stories that ought to be on our local top 10 list, let me know. Could be Wake’s ACC win, shakeup on the county commissioners, the school bonds, etc.

I’m reluctant to bring up our foibles, as many of you are quick to do that for me, but we had a funny mistake today in our B section. The story on B2 is about the scrum at the NC GOP over who is going to be the next chairman. Ferrell Blount, the current chairman and a pretty conservative fellow, is stepping down. Our headline said Ferrel (he spells his with One L) Guillory, who isn’t mentioned in the story. Guillory heads a program on southern media at UNC-CH and is at least loosely associated with Democratic politics/ideals/leanings.

I spotted the error before the calls started, which is really small comfort, but as one colleague quipped: I just hope neither one of them sues us for libel…

I don’t like making mistakes, but if you can’t laugh at the funny ones, then you are in trouble.

On an unrelated note, it’s instructive to look at two consecutive front pages this week with regards to WFUBMC. The first story was about a Chinese hoops wannabe coming here—yes, here—to get Gamma knife surgery to remove a tumor near his pituitary gland. The second was about the medical center’s problems with heart transplants and the federal government’s actions to remove Medicare funding for the procedures here.

I like this coincidence. It’s not planned (otherwise it wouldn’t be a coincidence) but it suggests to me an honesty of coverage, good and not so good.

Much of the government’s response to transplant issues was explored in a series of articles in the LA Times. They’re worth reading for a broader overview.

There’s nothing quite like an election in a newsroom. Even on the best of days, there’s a lot of compressed action, as reporters and editors push copy through on deadline. On election night, it’s magnified, as we wait for results and then work to make sense of it all. Lot of yelling and pacing and hoping that a computer glitch somewhere doesn’t mean we don’t have the tallies from an important precinct.

The TV in front of my desk today has been on CNN alot, and it’s been an endless parade of talking heads, going nonstop on what they think is going to happen, with an incredible amount of hedging so that if it turns out differently they can say they were still right (or at least not wrong.)

The electorate is fractured and angry and confused and emboldened. It’s still uncertain how it’s all going to turn out.

My predictions last week: GOP keeps control of the Senate and the House. Now, I’m not so sure. Still probably the Senate, but the House is much more in flux, and I think the Democratic candidates in toss-up seats may match up better against their opponents than on the Senate side. On the other hand, the GOP is better organized and the Kerry flap was the little gas on the fire to get the troops riled up. We’ll see what happens.

If you have any good tales from the polls, let me hear them.

Update, 8:04: We just had our pizza. You can’t cover an election without pizza. We had a big pizza meltdown—no pun intended—on the primaries, because we were feuding with our previous pizza vendor after its owners tried to out our restaurant reviewer. We went to a national pizza company, and there was nearly a revolt. Now, we’re at Vincenzos and everybody’s pretty happy. 

9:30: There’s some sort of snafu at the Forsyth Board of Elections. They’re calling it nothing unusual, but it’s only know that results are coming in. It’s much later than usual.

We are in another battle over 911 calls with local law-enforcement officials. We had asked for tapes from calls made for help with a stabbing death and with a fire on Brownsboro Road. On Monday, we reached agreement to get transcripts from the stabbing, but a judge sealed several of the fire 911 calls.

What’s interesting about our story is that although we got the stabbing transcripts, we only mentioned them at the very end and didn’t make a big deal of them. The reason is simple: there wasn’t much on them.

Now, one argument would be Why are you wasting time and money for something that turns out not to have much news value? The reason is simple. We don’t know what’s on the tapes/transcripts until we see them, and we believe that the public ought to have the right to judge their value, rather than have the law-enforcement/legal community judge on their behalf.

We’re still evaluating our options on legal strategies. I’ll keep you informed.

Memory Lane: Mike Decker’s guilty plea brought back a lot of memories from the 3+ years I spent covering the General Assembly. Decker was a more interesting politician than a lot of people think. Socially awkward, uncomfortable with the back-slapping go-along-get-along world of the General Assembly. In a profile from 1991, I wrote: He has a phrase for life at the General Assembly: fun, food and frustration.

And what about IHOP, where the deal between Decker and House Speaker Jim Black was allegedly hatched. Love the place and their pumpkin pancakes. You wonder if there is an ad campaign in the whole thing: Pancakes and politics, They go together at IHOP.

Sorry for the late post. Much of today was spent with a colleague who is leaving the Journal. David Rice is our senior Raleigh correspondent, and he’s moving out of journalism to take a job as a media/government consultant with a Raleigh law firm. A big loss for our paper.

David was a pro in the highest, best sense of the world. He probably knew more about state government—all of state government, including the nitty gritty that nobody knows about—than anybody I’ve ever met. A great memory and mind for detail. A love of bad jokes. A cell phone attached to his ear. A relentless reporter.

Anyway, that’s the circle of life at newspapers and other enterprises. Many newspapers have moved away from coverage of state government. The Journal has moved in the other direction. We expanded our government coverage a few years back. The reason is simple: the decisions that affect our lives, from taxes to education and health-care policy, are made in Raleigh, and state government functions best when an independent press is down there, hanging out in hallways trying to figure out what the politicians are doing with your money and your rights.

First things first: I was wrong. I said last week that Gloria Whisenhunt would come in second place in the 31st Senate GOP primary. She came in third, after Pete Brunstetter and Nathan Tabor.

The lesson from this race, to my way of thinking, is the clout of the immigration issue. Tabor rode it hard and, at least at the outset, established himself as THE candidate who would fight hardest on this. His campaigning pushed Brunstetter to the right as well, but with no general election, Brunstetter won’t get punished or reminded of those positions much anymore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Nathan Tabor eventually ends up in the seat now held by Larry Brown in the state house, but that’s another story for another day.

Election nights are crazy in a newsroom. A lot of pizza. A lot of waiting. Then cramming it all in as quickly as possible.

Newspapers such as the Journal spend a lot of time and resources covering politics and candidates. Does it make a difference? Yes. Some quick examples. John Garwood lost a GOP primary in the 45th Senate District. We’ve extensively covered his nonvote that allowed the lottery legislation to pass. The Turpin brothers in Stokes County lost in the GOP primary for county commissioner seats. Growth and school funding issues have been at the center of our coverage there. Allen Whitaker lost the GOP sheriff’s primary in Davie County. We’ve detailed problems in his department for the past several years.

This isn’t to say we have reporting agendas to get rid of candidates. But issues matter. Even—or especially—when there are low voter turnouts.

We’re in the midst of working on coverage regarding today’s protests regarding changes in our nation’s immigration policies. It’s a big, sprawling event, and it speaks to some of the internal debates in newspapers about the news value of protests.

We tend to shy away from publicity-seekers, and staged events are often particularly dry. In addition, there’s a bit of the bomb scare in all of this, i.e. we don’t cover bomb scares normally, because of the belief that covering them leads to more bomb scares. But when thousands upon thousands of people do something in a coordinated effort to draw attention to an issue, it becomes news just for the sheer bulk of it all. Anything large enough eventually acquires its own gravitational pull and can’t be ignored.

But what is large enough? 50,000 people on the Capitol Mall in Washington is little more than a blip. But put 5,000 people in Greensboro, and it’s on the front page. So there’s a great deal of relativism in what becomes news.

There are those who argue that covering protests gives too large a voice to people who have a complaint against the government. I disagree. Protest and assembly are vital parts of our democratic system. It is just a fact of life that most of these rallies are against the powerful. That’s why it’s called a protest. But that said, when 5,000 people gather locally to support a government action, we’ll be there.

A quick plug: Tony Flint, a friend and former colleague of mine, has written an articulate book about development, called

, published by Johns Hopkins press. It’s a well-done overview of how we got to this point of exurban McMansions, long commutes and disfunctional communities.

Quick thoughts for a rainy Wednesday:

1) Energy and politics have been entangled for years. They’re likely to become even more so in the future. That’s the back story of a push by GOP members of Congress from Western NC to allow for gas exploration off the NC Coast. This used to be a third rail issue for our delegation. No more. The War in Iraq, uncertainty across much of the international oil belt and supply constraints have changed the dynamics of offshore drilling. Won’t happen anytime soon. But it will happen.

2) The 31st Senate District continues to be nasty—and will get nastier in the final week. Money helps in politics. But it isn’t everything. My predicted order of finish: Brunstetter, Whisenhunt a close second, then Tabor, which might set Whisenhunt up nicely for a second primary challenge if she chooses and Brunstetter doesn’t get over 40 percent of the vote. She has the least money, but if you look at

, she consistently received more votes than Brunstetter when they ran in the same district on the board of county commissioners.

3) Ash trays and spitoons. Reynolds American is paying $3.5 billion—with a B—for Conwood. It includes the Taylor factory on US 158. Interesting move. The old RJR used all its cash to get away from tobacco. The new RJR can’t get enough. Times have changed.

If you ever want to get a scary, close-up look of what happens when big business meets big government, take a look at the Master Settlement Agreement

between the cigarette companies—RJR, PM, et al.—and the states’ attorneys general.

It’s an amazing document, one that we’ve written about and will continue to write about for years to come.

is over the major cig companies’ claims that their market share has dropped so their payments ought to drop as well.

There’s a lot of money at stake. One clue: The state allocation percentages of exhibit A. The shares are calculated out to 7 percentage points.  N.C.‘s share is 2.3322850%. 

LAX and the NYT: Interesting piece in

magazine about how the New York Times has been covering the rape charges involving members of the Duke Lacrosse Team.