The News Hole
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
A decade ago, three reporters from the Burlington Free Press covered Vermont’s State Legislature, and the paper kept an office in Montpelier all year. One reporter in the Associated Press’s Montpelier Bureau was in the Capitol just about all day, every day, while the Legislature was in session. On some days, two reporters from WCAX-TV (Channel 3) were in the Capitol.
Now Kristin Carlson covers the Legislature by herself for Channel 3. She’s quite good, but one person can not do as much as two. The Free Press Montpelier operation is down to two reporters while the Legislature is in town. The paper shuts down the office shortly after the session ends, said political reporter Terri Hallenbeck.
“Certainly three people can do more than two people,” she said. “There’s more chance to have some vision. Press corps-wide is where you really begin to see the over-all impact.”
She’s right, because the Free Press is not the only news organization that has cut back on covering government and politics in Vermont. So has the Associated Press, and it was the AP’s daily coverage of routine matters that gave the other bureaus the “luxury,” as Hellenbeck put it, to probe more deeply into what was going on in state government.
Now the AP reporter who covers the Legislature is at the Capitol only sometimes, Hallenbeck said.
That means that she and her colleague Nancy Remsen have to cover that day-to-day routine stuff themselves, leaving them less time to poke around to see where state agencies might be squandering your tax money, or whether a special interest is sneaking into passage a bill that would benefit it and nobody else, or whether a piece of legislation is being held up because Legislator A got mad at something Legislator B said over dinner at Sarducci’s the other night.
“I really have felt that,” Hallenbeck said. “You can’t depend on a given day that the AP is going to get that story.”
Neither can the reporters at the Vermont Press Bureau, which covers state government and politics for the Rutland Herald and the Times Argus. So said Jack Hoffman, who “got fed up” and quite the Bureau six years ago, but stays in touch with the reporters there.
Well, one might say, who cares? Isn’t this just a lot of journalistic Inside Baseball?
Yes and no. Because when news organizations don’t cover public affairs as much, or as well, the citizenry doesn’t know as much.
And a couple of things should be kept in mind. One is that these cutbacks started well before newspapers got into the financial trouble besetting them today. The bean-counters wanted to save money, sure, but they also acted on the assumption that most people didn’t care about government and politics, that readers wanted stories about murder, scandal, celebrities, and how to get rich.
The bean-counters may have been right. But there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy element in their decision, too. If you tell people less about something—and tell them about it in a more boring manner—they are certain to be less interested in it.
One result is a certain amount of political naiveté among the populace (see yesterday’s post, “Democratic Delusions”). Beyond that, when people learn less about something, they know less about it. In theory “new media” (blogs and the like) can fill in where traditional “old media” outlets have cut back. But Vermont’s blogs don’t really pretend to inform, merely to convey the blogger’s passions.
The result? Vermonters are politically/governmentally ignorant.
Which renders them apathetic, to their own disadvantage. That’s their money the legislators are appropriating and the agencies are spending. If the news media do not tell them how, where, and why they are doing it, they won’t know.
Maybe they don’t care. Worse, maybe the news muckety-mucks (as opposed to the working reporters) don’t care either. News coverage has not just gotten sparser; it’s gotten blander. And maybe the cause of that is more cultural than economic.
One reason he quit the news business, Hoffman said, was the increasing disinclination of some of his colleagues and bosses to challenge authority. To illustrate, he recounted a conversation he did not personally hear, but one participant was then-Times-Argus reporter Dianne Derby (now at Vermont Law School) who confirmed it.
Back in 2000, the newspaper had a page one story about a town clerk who quit. This was one of the town clerks who had objected to the then-new Civil Unions bill, proclaiming they would refuse to issue licenses for the unions as the new law required.
But the story made no mention of civil unions. Derby asked why. Well, said an editor, the clerk herself had said nothing about the issue. But there was such an obvious connection, Derby said. Just “connect the dots.”
At which point the editor said, “It’s not our job to connect the dots.”
Uh, it is actually. Just as it is the job of reporters not to take everything (or anything) they are told at face value, Just as it’s a basic responsibility of a state’s largest newspaper (that’s the Free Press) to staff its state capital year-round.
And maybe of the general public to complain more vigorously when these jobs are not done.—-Jon Margolis
