Otterblog

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Careful readers of the Journal would probably detect that our newsroom’s relationship with U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx is, to put it politely, strained. Some people might call it a feud, but I wouldn’t. A feud implies both sides are mad at each other and actively engaging in the other’s discomfort. I can’t speak for Rep. Foxx, but from the Journal newsroom’s perspective, there isn’t a feud. We’re just trying to cover the news.

The situation began in early August, when we interviewed Rep. Foxx about her trip to Iraq. Our story said, but didn’t quote her as saying, that she thought the war in Iraq was going well. She disputed our summary of her remarks. We reviewed the interview and said it was accurate. We even let her criticize the reporting in a subsequent article. We’ve had these disagreements with politicians before. But this one went from 0-60 in a heartbeat.

Letter writers swarmed over her comments, and they blanketed our editorial page editor with letters criticizing Rep. Foxx for her view of the war. The ratio of pro-con is very lopsided. As is the case at most larger newspapers, the news pages and the editorial pages are kept separate. They don’t tell us what stories to write, and we don’t tell them what opinions to have. Other than courtesy e-mails, we communicate very little with them and don’t coordinate coverage. Which is how it should be.

My sense is that this distinction, which we prize so heavily, is lost on lots of people. It’s in the Journal, and that’s all that matters.

We’ve tried to work things out with Rep. Foxx but have been unsuccessful. Lots of conversations with her staff but nothing has changed. She won’t talk to our reporters, on occasion going to elaborate lengths to avoid those conversations. Much of the Rube Goldbergesque arrangements of today’s debate appears to have been crafted to keep the Journal from covering it. And so it goes.

This places the newsroom in an uncomfortable position. First, we don’t like to be the news. Second, how we cover politicians is affected by the access we have to them. 

So where do we go from here? Not quite sure. There’s an election in less than a week, and my guess is that Rep. Foxx will be re-elected with a vote in the high 50s. Some people might say that’s a referendum on Foxx vs. the Journal. We lost. She won. We owe her an apology. I disagree. If you go back to what I wrote earlier, that the Journal’s newsroom has no feud with Foxx, then that supposition looks a little hollow. And even if you carry it over to the editorial page, it looks silly. Some of the candidates they will endorse will win, others will lose.

If Rep. Foxx never talks to us again, we just keep doing what we’re doing. We don’t stop covering issues just because somebody is mad at us.
We’re like Charlie Brown and the football. We’ll keep trying to talk with her. Our life goes on.

The larger issue is how do people find out what their elected officials are doing in Washington? The media is a filter and a strainer. We organize, we summarize, we analyze. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats alike—often prefer that the filter be removed, that their constituents get it straight from them, the words and deeds as they would like them to be presented. At many newspapers, that’s the case. They don’t have a reporter in Washington who keeps track of their local congressmen and congresswomen. They’re at the mercy of press releases.

That situation is likely to get worse. Washington coverage by small metro papers is disappearing. The Journal is one of the smallest papers in the country to have a full-time Washington correspondent. The point being, if we don’t cover Rep. Foxx, nobody else will, at least not with any depth or consistency. You might think, hooray! But you’d be wrong.

Voting the brand: One addendum to our story today on the Foxx-Sharpe debate is the dueling water bottles on the set. I’ve attached the jpeg of the photo above. Sharpe is a Dasani guy (it’s made by Coke); Foxx is with Nestle. Bigger bottle too. The question, of course, is this: Which candidate(s) brought their own water?