From the Herald-Argus:
Dunne asked for, and eventually got, Dubie’s schedule for his four years in office, but has pointed out there are discrepancies between what the schedule said and where Dubie actually was. For instance during a family trip to Hawaii, Dubie’s schedule still listed events in Vermont.
A letter that accompanied the schedule when it was sent to Dunne includes a disclaimer that it may not be entirely accurate, since it wasn’t updated when meetings were added or cancelled.
This may be disappointing to other Dunne supporters, but I say halleluia. The question has been posed and answered, which is all I, for one, was clamoring for (note: I still think there’s more to talk about on this, but I also don’t think it’s worth persuing at this point, when it’s GOTV time). Still, the last forty-or-so hours since the Dunne press release went out has been very informative for me, and I’ll see if I can explain why.
First of all, I/we received essentially four responses from attempts to reach the traditional media gatekeepers during all this…
- Stony Silence
- Stony silence in direct response, but some response in print/internet (e.g. Allen and Porter above and Freyne in his blog)
- A back and forth with one media insider who completely considered it a non-story
- A back and forth with a sympathetic media insider
In today’s Darren Allen piece on the Vermont blogosphere (which, when he spoke to me, he made a point of telling me right up front with an eye-rolling tone, that this was an “editorial-driven” piece, by which he was presumably telling me “If it were up to me, no way in hell I’d be bothering to waste any time talking to you…” – which may explain the piece a bit, if you were wondering), I get to hold forth a bit on what was at the time a spur-of-the-moment description of the quality and relevance of the political blogosphere.
There’s a flow of information, largely geographically located between Montpelier and Burlington, but made up of politicians, special interests, some government employees and the press. It’s a small, fast moving current, and what comes out of that flow into the public consciousness is a spigot controlled by the press… and they have both a quota of information that is allowed to flow from that spigot, as well as rules for what makes it into the spigot’s pipeline.
Consider the Dubie story. It was generated by a press release from the Dunne campaign, yet when I spoke to someone on the phone at the AP, he hadn’t heard anything about it. Why? He’d gotten the same release I had, right?
Well, the rules have not quite been followed by the Dunne campaign. In recent weeks, the Dunne Team has been flooding the media with press releases. In all honesty, most look like they were schlocked out in a few seconds. They are often poorly organized, replete with typos, WAY too long, and in one case even misnamed a local reporter (you know they just love that). In the case of the recent press release that caused me to post on this whole matter, you actually had to scroll down a few paragraphs to reach the salient point. In fact, they had tried to cram 2 or 3 different points in, so you really had to read it directly in order to find the material.
In these waning days, the press is doubtless getting inundated with press releases. To get their attention (especially when you’ve been hitting them with multiple releases they may be feeling inclined to disregard), you need to be concise and to the point, and hit them with a thesis statement in the title that’s relevant. That wasn’t the case. The Dunne peole didn’t play by the rules, so the AP reporter I talked to didn’t know what I was talking about.
There’s also the timing. I already knew that these operations were short staffed on weekends, but what I learned is that there’s a structural bias against last-minute “gotchas” the weekend before an election. The press doesn’t want to get played for patsies and are dubious about anything that falls into that time frame. This made it all the more crucial that the Dunne press release be concise and to the point, coming as it did Friday at noon.
All this is to say that I’m not as riled up as I was that we had to jump up and down and scream for coverage of an issue that, on it’s face, was as I said – a bombshell.
But we still shouldn’t have had to make such a fuss.
As guardians of the “spigot,” press professionals make themselves the gatekeepers of what is worthy for discussion, and what the parameters of that discussion will be. And they often make little allowance for just how subjective the judgments made in the service of that guardianship are. In my own experience in the last day, I’ve seen just how broad the range of that subjectivity runs. On the one hand, I had a press pro telling me this was a non-story and “propoganda.” On the other side, I had another press professional telling me that his colleague had it “exactly wrong” and that it was indeed an issue. Then, to complete the spectrum, there was what actually made the papers; a short, perfunctory acknowledgement and response waaaay down in an omnibus election piece. The question asked and answered (which, I should mention, is ALL I ever cared to see – the question responsibly asked, and responsibly answered, whatever that answer turned out to be).
In other words, a very few informational gatekeepers had as broad a range possible of opinions on whether or not to open the gate for this story. This demonstrates just how subjective this process is, and therefore how prone to all the biases and human frailties these decisions actually are. There is no formula a story is plugged into to gauge its worthiness. No empirical analysis. These people are going with their gut – a gut informed by journalistic experience, sure, but that gut is also entirely situated within the context of the insulated information flow described above, and qualified by the power inherent in being guardians of the spigot.
Now consider how the political blogosphere changes things. Questions are answered by facts, and facts inevitably generate more questions. The guardians of the spigot have had the luxury of shorthanding the process by asking and answering the questions themselves before deciding what flows into the public consciousness.
But now there are blogs, and bloggers have an uncanny habit of finding the raw facts for themselves. In this case, there were facts that raised questions; Dubie released a schedule after dragging his feet in response to Dunne’s request. That schedule (which he was loathe to release) contained a bright, shining, verifiable contradiction. That led a to a big question, and we in the blogging world waited for it to be asked in the press.
…and we waited, and waited, and waited.
The fact is that such high-stakes questions of dishonesty in the public service are newsworthy in themselves – no one would argue that. What heppened in this case was that the press’s role in serving as arbiter of those questions was usurped, and the press was all over the map regarding how to respond to that. What to do? Ignore it and eye-roll or cover it thoroughly and completely?
In the end, believe it or not, I am satisfied not so much with the content of the Allen/Porter piece above, but with the process that (I assume) led to its publication. It’s likely that Allen, Porter, and Freyne as well, implicitly realized that there was little point in arguing for the primacy of their informational gatekeeper role – that in this case, that was beside the point. The point is, that a question, raised by facts, and therefore demanding of attention did in fact make it’s way outside of that insulated flow of information without passing through them. That the question was out there, and as such, it became their responsibility to answer it.
And like it or not, the answer was short and rather anticlimatic. The traditional media gatekeepers had more facts than the bloggers did. That’s not a surprise in-and-of-itself, but when the choice to just chuckle about it amongst themselves (and therefore leave bloggers and blog-readers with their worst fears and conspiracy theories about the biases of the media seemingly confirmed), or recognize that the situation had changed, and the matter needed to be directly addressed, different reporters reacted differently – again underscoring the real subjectivity inherent in the whole process.
Porter, Allen and Freyne got it. The others didn’t. And maybe we’ve all learned a little something about the other in the process.
…and with the legislative session looming, this is only the beginning. The blogs create opportunities for people outside the Montpelier-Burlington information flow to tap into it directly, bypassing the gatekeepers. At present, that means we can inject a bit of ourselves into the conversation and impact what squeezes out into the print and television media. And that’s a very big deal.
But the time is coming when the Vermont political blogosphere – like it’s national equivalent – will begin to break down those barriers completely, by bypassing the gatekeepers rather than influencing them, and speaking to other Vermonters more directly.
And when that finally happens, we’re in a brave new world of media…
