How
the press won the speaker’s gavel
Any realistic
account of what happened last week when Representative Nick Mattiello became
Speaker of the House has to account for the actions of our state’s media. Our
state’s political press played an essential part of making Mattiello Speaker.
The reporters will complain this is unfair, but let’s look at the time line.
On Friday, March
21, — while FBI agents were still in Gordon Fox’s office — golocalprov was
tweeting exactly the rumors that Mattiello wanted everyone hear: that he had
control, that he had the votes, that resistance is futile.
Immediately
afterward, Kim Kalunian of WPRO radio followed, and Dan McGowan at WPRI, too.
Could Mattiello have realistically asked for more? These reporters let everyone
know that it was Mattiello’s office to lose. At that point, coverage like that
is what his bluff needed most.
But in the
press, you had Channel 10 and Cranston Patch (or what’s left of it) reporting
that Mattiello’s succession was a done deal. At the very least, this inaccurate
reporting sowed confusion and at worst it actually interfered with the Marcello
team being able to consolidate its gain.
Apparently the confusion, plus a
personal appeal from Paul Valletta, the firefighter’s union president, to the
two Woonsocket representatives who are firefighters, started the erosion of Marcello’s
support.
Republicans Joe Trillo and Doreen Costa indicated that their caucus
would weigh in, and would choose Mattiello, and they sped the erosion. But they
were just trying to bet on the winners, since an hour before they had been
supporting the other side.
Then on Sunday
March 23, the next day, Kathy Gregg at the Providence Journal and Ian Donnis at
RIPR buried Marcello’s team and that was pretty much that. As if what was won
on Saturday couldn’t be lost on Sunday or Monday.
Randy Edgar made
a little effort to report that it wasn’t a done deal on Sunday, but he was all
alone so had no effect.
So what do we
learn? The reporters named here will say that they had no choice but to report
what was coming at them. Great, so political reportage necessarily resembles a
mob? But not all reporters played along, as Randy Edgar and a few others
showed.
Even so, true or not, it is irrelevant to the point that the political
press played a crucial role in making Nick Mattiello’s ascension to speaker
possible. In their breathless chase of what’s happening right now right now
right now, they amplified his claims to have the votes and seemed to ignore the
possibility that anything else might happen. They served the powerful.
I hope the
reporters whom I count among my friends will eventually forgive me for saying
so, but in many ways the state’s political press did Nick Mattiello’s bidding,
from the broadcast of his unsupported claims on Friday to this curious post on Monday where WPRI’s Ted Nesi said
Mattiello won’t rock the boat and that his fervent embrace of every item of the
Chamber of Commerce’s agenda constitutes being a “moderate.” (And, of course,
since the Chamber’s agenda already ruled the House, Mattiello is unlikely to
feel the boat needs rocking at all.)
This kind of calming article was exactly
what was needed to consolidate the Mattiello team’s votes, to prevent fear of a
conservative takeover of the House. Which, of course, was precisely what was
going on, as even that article makes clear.
I suppose it is
possibly true that there is no other way to do political reporting except in a
mob that provides support to those who already have power, but that seems a
dubious proposition to me.
Reporters have a responsibility to their readers,
and a responsibility to the state they live in, and it seems to me that the
responsibility is an individual sort. Actions have consequences and none of us
are free from the moral dimension of those actions.
There will likely be
another election for Speaker after this fall’s elections, and will we see the
same presumptions, the same blind repetition of idle boasts, the same rush? We
will see.
