Over the weekend, that most reliable of conventional wisdom barometers, the RTD’s Jeff Schapiro, penned a column taking the Governor to task for his complaints about the press’ obsession with social issues. Jeff took exception to this and decided that McDonnell’s complaints put him on a level with Captain Queeg.
But Jeff went farther, launching into a defense of his own newspaper’s coverage of the General Assembly session to show that really, honest and for true, the RTD had spent a great deal of time covering all sorts of things besides abortion rights and guns:
“We have reported substantially on the budget, the state pension fund, education reform and key pieces of the governor’s legislative agenda as well as issues surrounding abortion and gun rights that have sparked great public interest this year,” said Times-Dispatch Editor Daniel Finnegan.
“And we have not heard one complaint from the governor.”
Just pay no attention to the fact that the Governor’s complaint is what elicited Finnegan’s response. And we must also ignore an unspoken, but widely known, truth in Virginia’s newsrooms: they really don’t like social conservatives and their issues and will go out of their way to paint social conservatives as whack-jobs.
Jeff Schapiro allows a stand-in to handle this problem:
Jeff South, journalist-turned-journalism professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, says the arithmetic of legislative coverage means the vast majority of bills — nearly 2,900 were introduced this year — get no mention. What does, he says, falls in three categories: the budget; “wacky bills,” such as space burial; and social legislation, including the ultrasound-before-an-abortion requirement that captured international attention.
“Often, these issues are shorthand for a politician’s overarching philosophy,” said South.
And so the circle jerk is complete. Jeff compares the Governor to a mentally unstable fictional character. He gets support from an editor who swears the paper has done its job well and can’t fathom the Governor’s complaints. And, says a former reporter, it’s those headline-grabbing issues that really tell us how a guy thinks.
Here’s hoping they all had the decency to shower afterwards.
But before we leave this topic, there is one “wacky issue” that didn’t receive much coverage at all in Virginia’s hawk-eyed press. As Steve Rossie points out, while the scribblers were giving blanket coverage to conservatives and their social legislation, they ignored one from the other side:
…such as the bizarre introduction in the Senate (for the second consecutive session) of the long-deceased, so-called “Equal Rights Amendment” for ratification the U.S. Constitution (SJ 130, which actually passed that radically right-wing chamber 24-15, before “wasting” the House’s time, where it died, again).
The reason this bill wasn’t covered? It didn’t fit the narrative.
