State of the Media

Rick Perry’s run for the White House is a stark reminder that not too long ago an identical media game plan was mapped out in Austin for then-Gov. Dubya:

Tout the Texas leader as the CEO, the man who runs a state like a buck-stops-here businessman.

Leverage national events against Texas themes so the candidate can claim to have solutions (“You want jobs? We got your jobs right here!”), all while suggesting that Congress and the White House are overspending idiots.

Cement the social conservative voting bloc.

And ignore sit-downs with tough-minded members of the media, opting instead for well-timed public appearances highlighted by unsubtle nods toward religion.

What’s obviously different today is that there are fewer and fewer dedicated national media resources to hold Perry to serious scrutiny. The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, to name two outlets, once jumped early and hard to lead the way with major, time-consuming and probably costly stories about presidential candidate George W. Bush and his military background.

But today the usual, aching reasons—dwindling money and staff—make drilling down on any candidate’s record much harder to do.

Meanwhile, as Perry lurches forward it would be good to remember how Bush’s own presidential media strategy evolved.

After Bush got his ass kicked by John McCain in the 2000 New Hampshire Republican primary, Karl Rove and the Texas insiders went into panic mode. A decision was made that Bush needed to devote his time to the hardcore Christian conservative base. Forget playing patty-cake with Texas or national media—and forget trying to convince anyone that Bush was a “compassionate conservative,” devoted to uniting, not dividing.

Bush turned his attention to “the base” in the next primary, in South Carolina. He infamously spoke at the evangelical Bob Jones University while, in the background, someone unleashed nasty anti-McCain e-mails suggesting the Arizona senator had fathered a child out of wedlock.

Bush won South Carolina and the strategy was affirmed: Preach to the social conservative choir, solidify that base, and deny the media deep access. 

That plan had its roots in master media manipulator Lee Atwater (who delivered George H.W. Bush to the White House, and who mentored Rove): Deride and ignore the media. Avoid pesky press conferences, interviews, Q&As and magazine profiles. Create base-flattering stump speeches disguised as “news events.”

So here we have Perry at Houston’s Reliant Stadium presiding over a prayer rally before 30,000 attendees and broadcast to 1,000 churches: “Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and, as a nation, we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us.”

Perry’s speechmaking skills are closer to Richard Burton than to Bush’s Elmer Fudd impression. But if Perry’s demeanor around some reporters is any clue, he seems to have every bit of Bush’s disdain for the media (a radio interviewer in West Texas said Bush called him an “asshole” in the 1970s; a national reporter said Bush cursed him as the reporter was dining with his wife and child in a Dallas restaurant in 1986; and in 2000, he called a New York Times reporter an “asshole”).

And Perry is clearly establishing the same “media” allies. Rush Limbaugh, who jump-started Bush’s campaign, is doing the same thing for Perry:

“He’s out there articulating the truth, he’s getting stupendous applause and yet, ‘Nah-nah-nah, can’t have Rick Perry. He’s from Texas. He’s too close to Bush. We don’t want anybody from Texas! Bush is from Texas … ’ This is the message from the elites, the inside-the-Beltway geniuses.”

Just as he did for Bush, Limbaugh is doing Perry’s media-bashing for him, yelling about how “the state-controlled media” is not happy with Perry.

As the campaign unfolds, watch Perry continue to avoid and dismiss the media.

Watch for him to pop up at more “news events” tied to social conservative themes—and see if the media really scrutinize who is funding and supporting those events.

Watch for Perry to continue aping Bush’s 2000 game plan.

And pray that the national media can do the reporting they should have done the last time a Texan ran for the White House.

The promise of small-staff and “citizen” journalism is coming to fruition in Texas—excellent, often unheralded, investigative sites are moving well beyond the partisan blather that defines other so-called “news venues.” There are dozens around the state. Some are incredibly hard to find. Some are surviving on bank accounts flatter than a gambler’s wallet. But though their journalists use affordable, cutting-edge technology, they haven’t lowered journalistic standards. Here are a couple examples.

Last year Patrick Brendel, 28, and Mary Tuma, 24, uncorked The Texas Independent. With backing from the nonpartisan American Independent Network, it has quickly become a vital “watchdog journalism” website. (Disclosure: Brendel was a student of mine at UT-Austin; Tuma also graduated with a degree in journalism at UT-Austin and is a former Observer intern.)

Brendel has a refreshingly old-fashioned ethos. “George Washington wrote, ‘There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily.’ My own ‘pursuit of happiness’ is seeking after truth, and journalism happens to be my outlet,” he says.

Fox News apologists—hell-bent on finding liberal bogeymen in every closet—would probably howl that The Texas Independent has a liberal agenda. But if you spend time on the site, you can see it shines the light on uncovered and under-reported Texas stories.

The Texas Independent has been out front in examining the state’s most powerful Tea Party component, the King Street Patriots. “They are mounting a serious First Amendment challenge to Texas’ corporate campaign finance restrictions, and have lobbied the state Legislature on behalf of voter photo ID laws and special privileges for poll watchers. They’ve become arguably the premier Tea Party group in the state, nabbed Gov. Rick Perry as the keynote speaker for the grand opening of their new headquarters and hosted the first of several Tea Party-orchestrated U.S. Senate debates,” Brendel explains. “We’ve been lucky to have them on our radar.”

Meanwhile, after receiving Knight Foundation funding, Ken Martin, 71, hit the ground last year with his pinpoint examinations of local elected officials on his Austin Bulldog site. Martin, a retired Marine who served in Vietnam, put in 30 years reporting and writing for several Texas publications, and now uses part of his Social Security check to keep his publication afloat. The Bulldog site says, “We’re small. We’re scrappy. We aren’t going to change the world, but we aim to make a difference in our little corner of it.”

Martin says he is proud of his work examining the Austin City Council’s possible violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act, which the county attorney is investigating. “The overarching goal in all of this is to drag the City of Austin into the sunshine of open government, and that’s very much still an ongoing project that unfortunately the city seems to be resisting in every way possible,” Martin says.

Brendel, Tuma and Martin are not driven by the preening vanity you see in some journalism circles, that chance to hang out with people in power. Something else seems at work. “I am most proud to be part of an organization that is not beholden to major corporate interests and works to represent the public and hold those in power accountable,” says Tuma.

There are several decades of age between Tuma and Martin. But both know that public-service journalism, perhaps especially in Texas, is a labor of love, long hours, meager pay . . . and, ‘hey, how are we going to pay the electric bill?’ Not many things have changed since Willie Morris, Kaye Northcott, Molly Ivins and Ronnie Dugger ran The Texas Observer. The powers-that-be are still arrogant and dismissive—and, as always, they’d rather spend time seducing and flattering the bigger news outlets.

So… why bother? Why bother filing those open records requests? Why be the lone reporter at the droning sub-committee hearing, or poring over deliberately hidden public documents?

“I have this radical idea that government ought to be open, transparent and operate completely in the public interest,” Martin says.

The Texas Tribune is wrapping up its first rodeo of legislative coverage. It now has alliances with The New York Times and several Texas publications. But is it any good? A multimillion-dollar startup instantly heralded in national outlets (including its future ally, the Times) should be the subject of a 4,000-word analysis, not a 750-word column. What political figures does it write about more often? Who does it routinely not write about? Who funds it, and are those people written about? What issues does it tackle regularly? Which does it regularly ignore?

Until someone writes that analysis, here’s what I like about it:

It provides jobs for excellent journalists. If you don’t think that is a good thing, then join the far edge of the Tea Party, denounce Thomas Paine and redact the Constitution.

It provides a look into Texas politics and state agencies, with pure numbers, statistics and intensive databases done by Matt Stiles. Emily Ramshaw takes a hard look at health care coverage. Ross Ramsey dissects the state budget.

It fills the aching gap left by wounded news outlets that can’t afford to cover state politics. It has kept everyone—The Texas Observer and the daily newspapers’ remaining political reporters—on their toes. News competition is back in play. That is a good thing for democracy.

Here’s what’s not to like:

The Times reported early on that the Tribune was going to offer “the good-for-you, Brussels sprouts journalism—education financing, lobbying, bureaucratic priorities, civics and state government … a niche site with a very narrow focus.” It has delivered on that, and it’s also been constrained by it. There are drawbacks to the demands of providing instant online journalism aimed at insiders.

What the Tribune needs is consistent, long-ball narrative and multipart investigative projects. It needs the 5,000-word drill-downs like Sy Hersh does for The New Yorker. It needs the huge packages that win Pulitzer Prizes for ProPublica, for investigative work and public service.

Sam Freedman, a New York Times writer and journalism professor, says the best stories exist on a temporal and eternal axis. You invest your stories with a legacy value—with huge context and sweep—so the stories have a longer shelf life, so the echo chamber resounds until the plutocrats really pay attention and maybe even go to prison for a long, long time. Associated Press correspondent and former Texas Observer managing editor Chris Tomlinson calls those the “WTF” stories, the ones that make readers go “What the fuck!” So far, it’s hard to point to a jaw-dropping WTF in the Tribune.

I took a very unscientific poll and called several editors, consultants, reporters and educators across the state. What startled me, and I have no precise explanation for it, was how many folks instantly went off the record when they wanted to criticize the Tribune.

They lauded the TT extensively, for sure, but their voices dipped down when they said they thought it was boring, too much inside-baseball, too busy-looking, or producing too few investigative stories. They wished the good reporters were unleashed to play to their talents. The reticence, I suspect, is partly based on jealousy and fear—that the Tribune has money, foot soldiers, and those connections to the Times. The number one criticism was that it is too insular, too focused on details and not enough on the Big Context.

Tribune co-founder Ramsey (who once hired me almost 25 years ago to write a book) defends his publication and essentially says the sum is greater than the parts: “It’s a constant balance between detail and context, for us and for everyone else who covers something that’s complex and/or insular. You can get lost in detail, but if you don’t pay attention to it, you can’t properly describe the big picture.”

The Tribune is coming of age during a particularly draconian legislative session that needs a special kind of numbers-crunching scrutiny. The question is, after the session is over and the oily agents of politics go home, will the Tribune chase them to the ends they deserve?

A major media player in Texas is up for grabs. Freedom Communications Inc. has been seeking bids on its assets. It owns 100 newspapers, including The Brownsville Herald, El Nuevo Herald, The McAllen Monitor, the Valley Morning Star in Harlingen and the Mid-Valley Town Crier in Weslaco. (By the time this column is published, new owners of Freedom’s assets might have emerged.) These South Texas newspapers are on the front lines of immigration, drug trafficking and border violence—not to mention chronic poverty, lingering racism, massive unemployment and environmental degradation.

In a downtrodden newspaper business, this border newspaper shift raises a thousand red flags:

Why the hell would anyone spend the money in the first place? What’s the end game? Most important, what does it mean for border residents and anyone else who looks to border papers for news from one of the most newsworthy regions in the nation?

The Freedom chain is not perfect, but I wonder what will come along to replace it. Freedom has openly advocated its libertarian principles, and it’s questionable whether the less-government-is-good-government editorials that often run in the Valley papers are wildly out of tune with a region that still has areas without running water. “They have to tow the libertarian line,” says Steve Taylor, a former Freedom reporter who runs the online Rio Grande Guardian. The Guardian has aggressively looked at the festering problems surrounding the colonias in the Valley.

Taylor, who knows the region as well as anyone, agrees it is massively difficult to cover—especially when newspapers have dwindling resources and fewer reporters. The papers do what they can, when they can. In the end, he believes the papers really don’t “do any in-depth investigations,” the kind that “force people out of office.”

Some activists in the Valley say it’s clear the papers already lack the resources to take on the hard issues. “The paper has gotten slimmer and slimmer as our social realities have gotten thicker and thicker,” says Mike Seifert, a former priest who helps lead the Equal Voice for America’s Families network, and who has been reading The Brownsville Herald for 15 years. “There are so many stories out there.”

My colleague at the University of Texas School of Journalism, professor Wanda Cash, has deep experience in Texas newspapers. She says the border papers do a good job with limited resources. “Olaf Frandsen (publisher of the Monitor) and Daniel Cavazos (publisher of the Herald), in particular, are outstanding newsmen who value good storytelling and share a deep commitment to serve their communities with truths that are not always pleasant,” she says.

As with other newspaper buyouts, it’s possible that a buyer could strip the papers to the bone. There are worrying signs. A couple of the interested buyers are private equity groups that have a history of starving newspapers, like Platinum Equity of Los Angeles, the MediaNews Group Inc., and Angelo, Gordon & Co.

Here is what the State of The News Media: An Annual Report on American Journalism (2010), produced by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, said about Gordon and Platinum: “While the private equity owners are undoubtedly in the newspaper business motivated by a chance to make money rather than for public service, they appear to be betting that these distressed properties will bounce back after several years.”

Some media analysts have said that the private equity firms might be looking to use their new newspapers to launch advanced online ventures. Perhaps that is where the Valley papers are headed.

There’s a lot at stake. This is a part of America that desperately needs watchdogs. That needs investigative reporting. That cries out for the righteous indignation that can only be summoned by powerful reporting. If new owners emerge, they’re duty bound to pursue all of that. The people who live along the border deserve nothing less.

State lawmakers are weighing a proposed 2012-2013 state budget that could impose draconian cuts on the state’s already piss-poor educational system. Schools, teachers, innovative programs—they are all in danger of being cut in the name of fiscal austerity. “This bill reflects the reality of the recession on Texas,” is how Rep. Jim Pitts, a Republican from Waxahachie, put it when he uncorked the proposed budget.

The massive cutbacks were surely coming at almost every level of education—but it was almost as if reporters were surprised when they began examining the budget proposals coughed up by Pitts and others. The news reports had a breathless quality. The overarching sense was that “we didn’t know it was going to be this bad.”

Which begs a simple question: Why not?

Stripped to the bone, with fewer reporting boots on the ground, Texas news outlets made the usual mistake in the last several months before the legislative session. They concentrated on horse-race coverage of political campaigns, they focused on narrow “truth in advertising” analyses of political promises, and they were entranced by the top-of-the-ballot battle between incumbent Gov. Rick Perry and Democrat Bill White.

Editors really needed to order reporters out of the air-conditioned corridors of power in Austin and hightail it into the heart of Texas. They needed to stop schmoozing with lobbyists and kingmakers in Austin and get to South Oak Cliff High School in Dallas. They needed to get to Bowie Elementary School in Abilene and Ramiro Barrera Middle School in Rio Grande City—to put a human face on the story that educators and parents were already forecasting firsthand.

Texas school districts and administrators have been operating on a wing and a prayer for years. The gap between the rich districts and the poor districts is ever-widening. Good teachers were already being cut, arts programs were in danger, and playgrounds were increasingly pockmarked. The budget crisis—the disconnect between tax revenue and educational spending—was apparent to many teachers and principals. They knew the numbers weren’t adding up. It’s one thing to scream for property tax cuts, but another to magically find the money to buy books, computers and basketball hoops.

Back when I slaved at The Dallas Morning News office in Austin that covers state government, I listened one day as the bureau chief announced: “Only one hundred people read our stories. And it’s the same one hundred people over and over again.”

He was referring to lobbyists, other Capitol reporters, lawmakers and other insiders who love bumping into each other along a small stretch of Congress Avenue. He was admitting that there wasn’t enough deep, contextual, immersion reporting. No human-interest reporting. The stories were written and reported in a dutiful way that reflected bureaucratic realities—but not in any passionate, anecdotal way that reflected the reality of life. Where was the real Texas?

The News still sends several reporters into the state Capitol. The Texas Tribune does the same. They are two of the engines of daily state government coverage, and they are using every form of multimedia to show what is unfolding under the Big Tent. Still, the reporting on education cuts seems like desperate Monday morning quarterbacking mixed with the exploration of triage plans. Do we tap the Rainy Day Fund, is it possible to raise taxes, do we try some fiscal alchemy?

These times require media outlets to pick their battles carefully, and education is always under-reported. It has everything to do with the futures of millions of children. Maybe, if the students’ realities had been chronicled vividly, today’s education news wouldn’t be so breathless.

And maybe, if the media had held an accurate mirror to the embattled educational system in Texas, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.