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TU Editors’ Blog
A gateway to reach the editors who make decisions about our news coverage.

Rex Smith: Hunger for truth not so strong
March 6, 2010 at 6:00 am by Rex Smith

Whatever your political inclination, you must agree that there’s a mess right now at the state Capitol. And you know, of course, that it’s the media’s fault.

That’s what an old friend told me this week, suggesting that the media was “hounding the governor” and elevating David Paterson’s relatively minor mistakes into front-page scandal, probably to sell more newspapers.

It’s a bold argument, considering that a district attorney is exploring possible perjury charges against the governor, the attorney general is investigating whether he intimidated a crime victim into dropping her complaint and federal prosecutors are looking into what may be corrupt behavior linked to his grant of the video slot machines contract at Aqueduct Racetrack. Plus, three top advisers have just quit and a fourth has been suspended, and a lot of people in the know say the governor has been blowing off his job.

All that sounds like front-page news to me. But maybe I’m just one of those yapping hounds bedeviling an under-appreciated public servant.

Blaming the media, after all, is good sport, and widely practiced.

This week the Bush administration’s last treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, complained that it is because of journalists that Washington policy makers “over-promise, then spin,” and that reporters in 2008 weren’t tough enough on critics of the bank bailout he engineered. And the historian Michael Beschloss writes in a new book that voters should blame reporters for the fact that they cast primary ballots without knowing about John Edwards’ adulterous affair.

I see. Edwards’ duplicity and the half-truths that dominate debate in Washington are really the media’s fault. If only we called them out more often, errant public servants would behave better. Except in the case of David Paterson, whose troubles are being exaggerated by the media because … uh …

On some points, the critics are right. There’s truth in Beschloss’ notion that since the emergence of primaries has taken away some of the clout of party bosses, the burden of vetting candidates now falls more heavily on political reporters. Tougher and smarter watchdog reporting would be a good thing. Nobody in the media would disagree...............>>>>........................>>>>.................http://blog.timesunion.com/editors/rex-smith-hunger-for-truth-not-so-strong/1816/