"The newspapers are gutted -- and everybody who is left is doing three other jobs. As a result, it feels like there is little accountability for candidates about what they say."
-- an unidentified Kentucky Democratic strategist quoted by Walter Shapiro, in his column for Politics Daily headlined, "Nikki Haley and Rand Paul races: Where have all the reporters gone?" For nearly ten years ending after the 2004 election, Shapiro wrote a twice-weekly political column for USA Today.
Shapiro is right, and it's not just staff cutbacks that have brought this about, but also expense account controls that at our newspaper have eliminated any travel within the state. We even have to get permission to drive anywhere outside our circulation district.
ReplyDelete"economically determined decline toward irrelevance" -- I love the phrase that ends Shapiro's column. It's a sad state of affairs when the C-J cannot properly cover a Senate race.
ReplyDeleteThe C-J was a great paper back in the 70s-80s when the Bingham's owned it.
ReplyDeleteBut then it was sold to Gannett.
Gee, even a hack like Shapiro occasionally produces something interesting.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure this assessment matches the facts on the ground in Kentucky. Since March 2009, when Jim Bunning announced his retirement, Rand Paul was mentioned 314 times in the Courier-Journal. He was on the radar from the start, and was a frequent topic of stories, columns, editorials and letters. The C-J commissioned a couple polls on the race, and his surge was not at all a surprise to anyone paying attention. Nor were his libertarian views a surprise -- they were detailed many times in the C-J. Anyone who lives here and follows politics knew very early on that this was a race between a Tea Party outsider (Paul) and an establishment Republican (Grayson). To be sure, Gannett has reduced the paper's coverage of the state, but I don't know how much more ink it could have devoted to Paul or this race.
ReplyDelete