Pine Tree Politics

The Death Of Maine Political Journalism

By Matthew Gagnon
May 2, 2010

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Update:  Because I don’t think I was clear enough when I wrote the below story, I did want to mention that this was not meant to imply that there is no quality journalism in the state covering politics.  Indeed, I have a lot of respect for Kevin Miller at the Bangor Daily, Matt Stone has already proven his worth as a reporter, AJ Higgins is consistently full of excellent reporting – and the fledgling Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting has done a good job as well.

The below rant is about the political media in Maine as a whole.  Specifically, the Maine Today newspapers, but more broadly the entire print media establishment in the state.  A couple good reporters doing very good work do not pick up the slack for the rest of the media that is not doing their job.  The traditional press is dying, and they are largely dying due to their own inability to adapt to the changing ways people consume information, while simultaneously putting less emphasis on hard hitting, investigative reporting.

So, for my friends in the media who are doing a good job, please understand this article is not directed at you.  This is a “big picture” commentary.

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So far, there has been only one story run in the mainstream press about the Otten plagiarism scandal that I broke Friday.  Meredith Goad of the Portland Press Herald “reported” on the incident, and the editors at Press Herald gave the article the laughable headline “Otten apologizes in policy statement flap”.

Let’s put aside the fact that this is the same paper that felt that the non-story of Eliot Cutler being video taped by a young girl at his campaign stops was front page news.  Let’s put aside that in comparison, a major scandal involving a Republican campaign’s repeated and large scale plagiarism of a conservative think-tank’s research and hard work in both a response to a questionnaire, but also in its jobs plan, is somehow only worthy of a yawn inducing non-story.  Goad’s article is terrible for a whole host of other reasons.

It shows exactly why the traditional press is dying in this country, and in Maine specifically why the media outlets continue to hemorrhage subscriptions.  It is a superficial (I would call it lazy) account of what happened, how it happened, and what the story really means for Otten and for Maine voters who he is asking to vote for him.  It gave him a forum to feed a lie to the people, and he was never challenged on it.  It was journalistic malpractice.

I am not the only one to notice just how woefully inadequate this article (and the accompanying non-coverage from the rest of the media establishment) was.  Steve Bowen of Maine Heritage Policy Center is not letting this issue go, and seems more than a little offended that Goad essentially let Otten off the hook by letting him spin the situation without following up on anything he said.  He also doesn’t seem to take Otten’s non-apology apology for anything other than what it was – inauthentic political spin:

In today’s Press Herald piece, the Otten campaign offers up yet another spin on the story, suggesting that only “two paragraphs” of my work went without citation.

Really?

Thinking this might be a less than accurate representation of what happened, I took some time this morning to compare my testimony to the Otten campaign’s answer on Augusta Insider. I then went back through my testimony and highlighted the sections (bolded and italicized in the images below) that the Otten campaign lifted – word for word – from my work.

Two paragraph’s worth? You decide. Remember, the text in these images that is bolded and italicized was used – word for word – by the Otten campaign without any citation.

He then goes through his testimony and highlights the more than TEN paragraphs the Otten campaign lifted from his testimony, and concludes:

And we are to believe that this was an “inadvertent oversight”?

Please.

Amazing.

But more amazing is that Goad didn’t follow up on that fact.  She accepted (and reprinted) Otten’s statement verbatum, and allowed him to use the Portland Press Herald as a spin machine reputation management mechanism, and she did not challenge or fact check what he told her.  From her article:

Otten said in a phone interview Saturday that there were only two paragraphs out of 50 that were not attributed to Bowen. Bowen, however, claims the situation is more serious than that. Whoever wrote the material, he says, didn’t simply lift it but rewrote and edited it, taking his work and turning it into bullet points.

Otten said a staffer made the mistake of not attributing the material, but Otten reviewed it “so I have to take responsibility.” He said he had called both Bowen and Tarren Bragdon, chief executive officer of the policy center, to apologize.

This was a perfect time for Goad to do what reporters are supposed to do, and dig into the story.  All she had to do was take a minute or two and do what Bowen did, and check his testimony to see if it was “just two paragraphs” or if it was indeed a great deal more than that (which it was).  That is the kind of investigating that reporters are supposed to do, so they tell the whole story.

This little example shows the folly of the traditional press.  They have been reduced to little more than note takers, and people who reprint spin from candidates.  What was the last example of true investigative political journalism you saw from Portland Press Herald, or truly the entire media establishment?

They are reactive – in other words they simply react when stories blow up around them, they do not investigate and blow the lids off stories themselves.  For a great example of what I mean, see Al Diamon’s breakdown of the difference between investigating and making news, and then reacting to the already made news regarding last weekend’s developments circulating around John Richardson.

To demonstrate all the opportunities that Goad and the rest of the media establishment had to go beyond simple note taking, and investigate and expand on the story to tell a more complete and accurate version of the events, I would like to take a few choice passages and digest them:

A Republican gubernatorial candidate issued a statement Saturday answering charges that his campaign plagiarized an answer to a political website’s questionnaire on education policy.

Charges from who?  Where did this come from?  I’ll tell you who – me.  This story exists because I blew a lid off of it.  I think mentioning that is probably called for.  But more importantly, this first paragraph shows that she had no interest in telling the story of how this controversy emerged, and even why Otten was forced to respond to it.

The political kerfuffle began when the Augusta Insider website teamed up with another website, Dirigo Blue, to develop a survey on education policy for all of the Blaine House candidates. The candidates’ answers were posted Friday.

Actually, the “kerfuffle” began when Otten was forced to issue a response to my charges that he plagiarized Bowen’s material, which gained so much notice so quickly (if you would like, I can post my traffic statistics) that calls and emails began to pour into Bowen.  They didn’t contact him because of an anonymous comment that nobody read on Augusta Insider.

Bowen’s response was instigated by Otten’s response – that is ultimately what made him so angry.  Otten’s response would never have existed if I hadn’t brought attention to it – because nobody else covered it.  Thus, if I hadn’t covered it, Otten wouldn’t have responded, which likely would have meant neither would have Bowen, and this entire story wouldn’t have existed.  Kind of an important part of the issue, huh?

Otten said in a phone interview Saturday that there were only two paragraphs out of 50 that were not attributed to Bowen. Bowen, however, claims the situation is more serious than that. Whoever wrote the material, he says, didn’t simply lift it but rewrote and edited it, taking his work and turning it into bullet points.

So, was it only two out of 50 paragraphs?  Did you fact check his statement, or just let him get away with shameless spin?  Obviously you did not.  Are you here just to parrot what a political candidate says and allow them to turn a bad story into an opportunity to spin for themselves, or are you here to investigate the truth?  That was a rhetorical question – everyone knows the answer.

Otten said a staffer made the mistake of not attributing the material, but Otten reviewed it “so I have to take responsibility.” He said he had called both Bowen and Tarren Bragdon, chief executive officer of the policy center, to apologize.

This is where my top blew.

As everyone knows by now, I work on campaigns for a living.  I have seen how campaigns behave on the news/coverage side of things, and I see first hand how campaigns operate on the campaign side of things.

I know that campaigns will often take WEEKS to put together a campaign’s policy answer like this, as their communications team hones the message, runs it by the candidate, edits it, passes it around again, makes more changes, runs it by the candidate again, and finally sends it out.  As somebody who is personally part of an “approvals” team that does exactly that I know first hand that something like this is not the work of some inexperienced intern who simply forgot to attribute, but that a campaign’s communications team is intimately involved and that the candidate in all likelihood signed off on it.

I have also seen how campaigns behave from the coverage side of things.  Bruce Poliquin once took (to his and his team’s credit) months to submit to me an oped.  Every time I would email his communications team asking about its status, I would be told that they were making changes, and Bruce wanted to look at it again.  This is exactly how every campaign works.  His is not the only campaign I can tell that story about – the reality is, they are all like that.

But Goad just lets that statement go by without providing any context or explanation.  She doesn’t investigate how campaigns operate to fact check that claim.  She doesn’t provide any context about how campaign communications operations ACTUALLY work.  She just let the statement go unchallenged, and in so doing allowed Les Otten to shirk blame for his campaign’s plagiarism to a staffer.

Worse, for anyone not familiar with campaigns (99.999999% of human beings alive in Maine), this statement sounds perfectly reasonable and completely feasible.  Without the investigation, the detail, the story behind the story that provides context for the reader, Otten has just used her as a tool to spin.

And for my friends in the media saying to themselves, “yeah, that works great for blogs, but we can’t just editorialize” – you are missing the point.  No one is asking the media to become partisan, provide colored commentary or otherwise turn this into a hit piece.  But a reporter has a duty to inform, and tell the story as it really is.  A brief mention about how campaigns are structured and how statements like this make their way through the highly redundant and painstaking process of approvals is not only appropriate but in a story like this, should be required. It isn’t opinion to discuss that.

Which brings me to the biggest problem with this article.  What is missing from it.

The big story here isn’t Otten’s ripped answers to a questionnaire.  It is the larger story about his serial plagiarism, specifically the plagiarism found in his “Jobs for Maine” plan, which is a central tenet of his campaign.

Where was the mention of Otten’s plagiarism of Maine Heritage in his jobs plan?

Where was the mention of his staff attempting to cover for that plagiarism?

All of the facts in those two stories are a matter of fact, that require no partisan sourcing.  They are just sitting there just waiting for a reporter to talk about them – they need nothing other than to be pointed to and talked about.  I don’t even need to be mentioned – these facts are out there.

The bigger story here is that a central campaign “plan” is itself lifted from Maine Heritage.  The story is that it is not just his answer to Augusta Insider, but rather a long and dubious history of passing off other’s content as your own.

How this was omitted from Goad’s story baffles me.  Again, we aren’t talking about something only a blog like mine can talk about.  We aren’t talking about unsourced material.  We aren’t talking about something that by its very nature would preclude a media outlet from talking about.  We are talking about plain as day facts, that tell a more complete (and much more damning) story about this particular controversy.

But that story isn’t told.  Why?

Why, Portland Press Herald, is a meager little college student recording public appearances by a candidate some kind of massive scandal that deserves front page coverage, while this story is passed over as just a little blip in the road.  Not really much of a big deal.

As somebody who has dealt with aggressive (and quality) media in other states – particularly Missouri, Massachusetts, California, Florida and several others – I can tell you without anything resembling doubt that were this to have happened in any one of those states, the traditional media would have been all over it, and beat the drum all weekend.

Instead, in Maine where political reporting is note taking, and scandals are an inconvenience to cover when there is somebody who stole a pack of cigarettes from a convenience store in Camden, we are treated to a brush off story and a glossing over of what should have been a major scandal.

You still have some time to redeem yourselves.  The facts are out there, the story is waiting for you to tell.  The entire Republican electorate is buzzing about this, and are hungry for information.  My blog is very well read, but simply can not compete with the reach of traditional outlets, so this story needs to be told by somebody other than me.

But please, by all means, continue to cover some crazy lady trying to put a blanket over a pair of tits and Willie freaking Nelson instead of covering a major political scandal evolving in the race to lead this state.  Just don’t call me for a job when  your paper goes under and you need work.

Tags: 2010 Gubernatorial Race, 2010 Republican Gubernatorial Primary, Les Otten