Raleigh Dispatch: Silent Mike Edition
When Gov. Mike Easley spoke out forcefully for the first time on the Duke Lacrosse Case, he was a 500 mile drive up I-95.
Easley was talking to a group of NYU law students in New York, reported the News & Observer, when he blasted Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong.
For those of you keeping score at home, that’s roughly 500 miles from the 8.5 million citizens Easley governs, the people he represented when he appointed Nifong, the people who might rightfully have looked for him to intercede in what has become a hash of jurisprudence.
Should you be upset?
Maybe.
I get all cranky about this sort of thing, but I’m a scruffy reporter and prone to getting cranky about just about anything. And being a scruffy reporter type, I happen to think that public officials – especially elected ones – ought to speak to their constituents on a regular basis about the important issues of the day.
Of course, my more Zen side tells me that Easley is simply being Easley. Despite being a pretty gifted public speaker and mentally pretty fast on his feet, the man just doesn’t like hold court with reporters in any form or fashion.
Aside from one roundtable interview he does with reporters at the end of the year, Easley’s interaction with reporters is limited to when they can catch him – if they can catch him – at public appearances like bill signings, policy addresses and the like.
Not that his press office makes it Easy.
Consider last week, when Easley made two public appearances on the same day. E-mail alerts from his press office were sent less than an hour in advance of each. That’s not exactly a ton of time to scramble the troops.
When reporters do catch up with Easley at an event, it’s hit or miss if he’ll take an “off-topic” question. Sometimes – on infrequent occasions – he’ll spend 15 minutes or so taking fliers from the peanut gallery. Sometimes, more frequent than any extended rap session, he’ll duck out the back door without fielding any.
Easley is not unique. I queried some colleagues in other states about their governors last fall and a few reported even more tight-lipped chief execs.
But far more of them reported some greater degree of accessibility. Colleagues from Florida reported that former Gov. Jeb Bush could be caught roaming the halls of the Florida capitol building from time to time. Others reported their governor had more or less regular briefing opportunities or would return the occasional phone call.
To my knowledge, Easley doesn’t do phone calls, at least not with us scruffy press types.
So, I’ll ask again: should you be upset? After all, this could all be a lot of whiny, inside baseball reporter stuff that regular folks need not mind.
Well, consider this: some of the most pressing issues of the day in North Carolina include the Navy’s proposed outlying landing field down east, the apparently troubled death penalty process, hundreds of millions of dollars of pending capital needs that the state may borrow to satisfy, and heck, let’s throw in funding crunches related to services for illegal immigrants.
Do you have any idea where your state’s chief executive stands on any of them?
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Raleigh Dispatch is an online only column that appears here every Monday the legislature is in session.
Comments (2)
To report abuse of the comment feature on this site, please use the feedback form at the bottom of any page.
The answer to your question is no.
This guy has gotten a free pass for too long.
Posted on February 4, 2007 10:07 PM
Mark, time to do another story about a John Edwards web person...
Of course, this time you won't. In fact, I challenge you to do ANY reporting on this at all.
I can assure you that in your fawning over Edwards you won't bother to mention the latest hiring over there...
(see how this works? you cover one webmaster hiring and you really should cover them all or be accused of favortism -- which isn't hard to prove...)
the latest from Edwards' braintrust:
Edwards Hires Foul-Mouthed Lunatic For Webmaster
Her name is Amanda Marcotte.
She currently runs a justly obscure blog called Pandagon.
But it turns out that Ms. Marcotte is, to put it mildly, an America-hating lunatic. She is also remarkably foul-mouthed, even by today’s standards.
Here is a sampling of her lofty prose, courtesy of Google
That’s right, this wordsmith has managed to work the "F-bomb" into at least 2,470 articles on her site. (No wonder Google Ads thinks it’s a porn site.)
So much for elevated political debate.
And while we are on the subject of sexual intercourse, Ms. Marcotte was especially insightful chronicling the "Duke Rape" case.
Meaning she got it completely and hilariously wrong at every turn — starting here:
The gang rape is the essential scene of the patriarchy
Published by Amanda Marcotte March 29th, 2006 in Crime
So, while the site was down, the big news burning up the feminist blogosphere is this horrific gang rape at Duke. I’m happy to see so much attention being paid to it; I’m even happier to see that there’s been protests [sic] at the university. Without social support for the victims of these crimes, the assailants usually don’t get any justice…
What does that headline even mean? "The gang rape is the essential scene of the patriarchy"? Is Ms. Marcotte not a native English speaker?
And yet, even as we speak, Ms. Marcotte and the Edwards camp are furiously erasing her similarly scintillating internet musings.
Such as Ms. Marcotte’s further exegesis on the Duke ordeal (available now only via Google’s cache):
Stuck at the airport again…..
Published by Amanda Marcotte January 21st, 2007
Naturally, my flight out of Atlanta has been delayed. Let’s hope it takes off when they say it will so I don’t miss my connecting flight home.
In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good f----- god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f---ed her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.
So if uninformed and crudely written obscenity-laced juvenile rants are your thing, search her while you can.
Or just direct your browser to John Edwards’ website.
Mark.. here is your challenge to be a real reporter and do something on this.... or, just confirm everyone's beliefs about your weak, one-sided coverage..
Posted on February 4, 2007 11:19 PM