Election Aftermath
Conrad Burns’ Targeting of the Messengers
By Dennis Swibold, 11-17-06
The best concession speech I heard on election night came from Texas third-party gubernatorial hopeful Kinky Friedman, who promised "to retire in a petulant snit to a goat farm."
It's never easy to lose, but what a candidate says in losing speaks volumes.
Manners generally dictate that losers accept the voters' judgment, nod graciously to the opposition, and offer to swallow any blame for the loss - at least while the cameras roll.
The last part is the toughest. It stuck famously in Richard Nixon's craw after he lost his 1962 race for governor of California. Montana's lame duck Sen. Conrad Burns seems be to having the same difficulty.
Earlier this week, Burns chastised Washington reporters for The Associated Press and Lee Newspapers, saying he was "taken advantage of." He said the reporters "weren't very honest" with him. He refused to elaborate.
Stepping into an elevator, Burns suggested the reporters read the Bible's 109th Psalm, which begins, "Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise; For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me."
One must assume Burns' prayer for vengeance has to do with the press's reporting of Burns' ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty earlier this year to federal corruption charges.
It's a fact that Burns accepted more campaign cash from Abramoff and his associates than any other member of Congress. It's also a fact that Burns returned or donated the money after Abramoff's skullduggery became national news.
The story was - and still is - news. Given what we know about Abramoff's self-confessed tactics and given the guilty pleas and convictions of others, only the most naïve would expect the story to wither with a denial or two.
It was a national story, but Montana journalists also had an obligation to dig as deeply as they could - and dig they did.
Reporters throughout the state, from both traditional and on-line media, contributed to the effort, but the Lee State Bureau - and reporter Jennifer McKee especially - deserve special credit for its examination of the links between Abramoff, Burns staffers and the senator's votes.
Their questions were our questions. They had to be asked, regardless of pressure or the political circumstances.
My hunch is that we haven't heard the last of the story. We may learn that Burns was indeed "taken advantage of."
He may have reason to summon heaven's thunder. But in targeting the messengers, he's calling in the wrong coordinates.
Mr. Swibold is a professor at the University of Montana's School of Journalism
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-Californiamontanacan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Burns#Abramoff_and_tribal_contributions
His fight to keep the horse slaughtering plants open so they can kill our wild mustangs and sell 'em to the French is reason enough for any good Montanan to run him out of town.
And BTW, the quote Mr. Crisp references above was also by Kinky Friedman. I heard him give it last night, to great laughter. Honesty is so refreshing, isn't it?
"The people have spoken -- the bastards"
Dick Tuck
Political operative (Democrat and Republican)
1966
Upon losing a vote for House Democratic Leader after a majority had promised their votes to him, he said, "The difference between a caucus and a cactus is this--a cactus has its pricks on the outside."
As is the right leaning aspect of modern journalism.
-Californiamontanacan
>>>>>
Do the major media outlets in the U.S. have a liberal bias? Few questions evoke stronger opinions, and we cannot think of a more important question to which objective statistical techniques can lend their service. So far, the debate has largely been one of anecdotes (“How can CBS News be balanced when it calls Steve Forbes’ tax plan ‘wacky’?”) and untested theories (“if the news industry is a competitive market, then how can media outlets be systematically biased?”).
Few studies provide an objective measure of the slant of news, and none has provided a way to link such a measure to ideological measures of other political actors. That is, none of the existing measures can say, for example, whether the New York Times is more liberal than Tom Daschle or whether Fox News is more conservative than Bill Frist. We provide such a measure. Namely, we compute an ADA score for various news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox News’ Special Report, and all three networks’ nightly news shows.
Our results show a strong liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. And a few outlets, including the New York Times and CBS Evening News, were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than the center. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.
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