Soccer Dad

The Washington Post and Governor Ehrlich

The Washington Post has weighed in with and editorial "Mr. Ehrlich and the Press." The point of the editorial is to chide the governor once again for his failure to play by the media's rules:

Rather than suffer the impudent professional doubters who populate newspaper staffs, Mr. Ehrlich has tried to disseminate his message directly, through submissive talk radio programs. He also has gone further, issuing an order last year forbidding all state officials from speaking with two Baltimore Sun journalists who irked him by writing critically.

Actually if Governor Ehrlich were banning reporters for writing critically, he would have banned reporters from the Washington Post too. In the two cases in question David Nitkin apparently had written articles that the governor deemed unfair but the sticking point was a mistakenly labelled map that accompanied one of his articles. In the case of columnist Michael Olesker, Olesker suggested that he had been at a news conference that he had not been at. So the issue is imprecision (or mendacity) not criticism.
Of course precision when it comes to Governor Ehrlich is not really what the Washington Post is interested in. Here are two recent items from the Post about the governor. First there's "Members of the First Family All on the Same Page" by John Wagner and Matthew Mosk:

"They lie," she said, according to news accounts of a stump-style speech to the Republican central committees of Worcester, Wicomico and Somerset counties. "I would punish my son if I caught him in a lie, and they need to be punished."

The governor clarified later in the week that his wife was referring to the Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post. There was no word on the appropriate punishment.

He has had a long-running feud with the Sun that resulted in a ban on two of the paper's journalists last year. The Sun responded with an unsuccessful lawsuit, which is on appeal.

"We refer to them as 'the plaintiff,' " Ehrlich said in his remarks Thursday to the business group.

The governor's disdain for The Post has been more selective, but it intensified after the newspaper reported that a longtime Ehrlich aide, Joseph Steffen , acknowledged spreading rumors about the personal life of Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley (D).

Then there's "Maryland's Eventful Assembly" by Michele Dyson:

Then there is the case of the self-described Prince of Darkness, Joseph Steffen. It's hard to calculate what benefits his bosses thought could be gained by parachuting him into various state agencies to ferret out, intimidate and fire state employees he alone considered disloyal to the administration; but it's easy to figure out the cost to Ehrlich. Once the rock was lifted on his chat-room rumors regarding Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley's alleged infidelity, the harsh light that was cast on the rest of his "work" ended up tarnishing Ehrlich's image.

Ehrlich managed to come through the two previous sessions with his poll numbers and image intact. But the Sun poll now has Ehrlich trailing O'Malley 45 percent to 39 percent. And while this last session may have roughed Ehrlich up a bit more than previous ones, his own people may have thrown him under the bus.

These are apparently news items; neither appeared on the editorial page. Each is filled with speculation and spin intended to make the governor look bad. And each withhold a critical piece of information.
In the first article, the reporters boast that Governor Ehrlich's "disdain" for the Washington Post "intensified" after the Post reported that an aide of the governor's disseminated rumors about Baltimore Mayor O'Malley's personal life. What the Washington Post hasn't written about is a report appearing on WBAL-TV two weeks ago showing that Steffen's role in the rumors is a lot murkier than originally reported. In fact e-mails reported by David Collins of WBAL-TV showed that Steffen resisted the spreading of the rumors despite being egged on by someone else. It's still unclear why Steffen resigned if the charge wasn't true, but it does appear that what the Post first reported needs clarification the Post has not followed up on the WBAL report at all.
Nor has it followed up on the report by Collins the next day that a member of Mayor O'Malley's staff apparently had advanced warning of the Washington Post article on Joseph Steffen. The apparent co-operation between the Post and a politician should have forced the Post to follow up and see if there was any impropriety or carelessness on the part of its staff.
Of course neither of Sunday's articles acknowledged either of the WBAL reports. The reason for that is, as Dyson noted:

Once the rock was lifted on his chat-room rumors regarding Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley's alleged infidelity, the harsh light that was cast on the rest of his "work" ended up tarnishing Ehrlich's image.

Both WBAL reports cast doubts on the completeness of the earlier reporting and suggest that Steffen (and by extension Ehrlich) was somewhat less culpable in the rumor spreading than originally reported. Of course then the tarnish on Ehrlich's image wouldn't be as severe. And as we know, in eighteen months the Post will be endorsing a candidate for Governor of Maryland and we know that that candidate will not be Robert Ehrlich.
Of course for that endorsement to have meaning the Post will have to demonstrate that is coverage of the governor has been fair and above board. So far it has failed miserably. It was perfectly willing to publish damaging information about the governor but has refused so far to follow up on publicly available information that might be exculpatory. It also has failed to investigate the possibility that one of its staffers carelessly released information to the staff of one Governor Ehrlich's rivals giving that rival a political boost. Until the Post comes to terms with its selective coverage of the governor, its endorsement in November 2006 will mean nothing.
UPDATE: When I sent Washington Post reporter Matthew Mosk a link to my post, he responded saying that Collins's report contained nothing new and pointed to his report of Feb 11. That report, though, does not include:

MD4Bush: "If some of my friends and I were interested in keeping the story floating, do you have suggestions for us on how best to do it?"
Steffen: "I cannot and will not offer suggestions that may be considered unethical concerning what you should do, campaign wise. This is especially true concerning MOM's (Mayor O'Malley's) personal life. Work to hit the mayor constantly in letters to the editor (about city issues, not personal issues), call in radio shows etc."

Even reading Mosk's report, it looks more like Steffen is boasting about being aware of the efforts to spread rumors about O'Malley, possibly even something he was aware of as it happened, but not necessarily something that he was involved in. Still Mosk had no problem using a an unchallenged Democratic quote to establish the tone of the coverage in an article a few days earlier:

Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery) said he will ask top lawmakers to grant him subpoena power to conduct hearings into what he called "the Watergate-style dirty tricks" used to smear O'Malley, a Democrat who is laying the groundwork to run for governor in 2006.

Steffen is being used as a proxy for Ehrlich. In order to do that it must be established that Steffen was a dirty trickster who also fired many people for a lack of ideological purity. The fact that only 280 out of 7000 political appointees were fired by the Ehrlich administration mitigates against the charge that Ehrlich has been firing Democrats with abandon. The additionaly e-mails (or more likely postings) that Collins reported on cast further doubts on Steffen's role. While I appreciate Matthew Mosk's e-mail, I still think that the events are less clearcut than have been reported.
Finally, Mosk didn't address the issue of how the O'Malley campaign knew in advance about the Washington Post report. Incidentally, while Collins reported on that two weeks ago, Chip Franklin was already asking about the connection between the O'Malley campaign and the Post when this story first broke.

Posted by SoccerDad at May 3, 2005 06:02 AM | TrackBack