Having gotten to know many of the members of the press corps that cover California politics, I have found them to for the most part be pretty fair and balanced.  There is always an occasional example of some liberal reporter going too far — but generally, for our part here in the Golden State, we’ve got a good crew of reporters (almost all of whom invariably voted for President Obama – but then again, so did most Americans).

There is no good reason for Meg Whitman and her campaign to go through Herculean efforts to avoid meaningful dialogue with the California press corps.  All it does is feed speculation that she has good reason to do so, when I don’t think that is the case.  I have heard Whitman in intimate campaign settings, and have myself sat down with her on more than one occasion writing for this website.  I’m confident that she would do just fine in media interviews.

As a Republican Party officer, who is neutral in this primary and is waiting on the proverbial "50 yard line" to help our nominee win the office in November, I really do believe that practice makes perfect where it comes to media interviews.  Before Meg and the GOP get into a general election situation (if Whitman were to defeat Steve Poizner for the GOP nod – a significant if) I would like to see her having already gotten used to fluent and thorough conversations with media reporters.  I often find that these reporters think of and ask questions that are interesting, but frankly a lot of questions are things I never would have thought to ask, but am interested in hearing the responses.  All voters benefit from this kind of in-depth reporting about candidates who will appear before them on the ballot.

Of course if a reporter is unreasonably hostile, and writes a biased, non-objective negative story, that would be an immediate incentive to cease contact with that reporter, especially if corrective action isn’t taken by an editor.

I have not been in a hurry to pen a commentary on this topic as it seems like how an individual campaign handles the media is really its own business. 

Except as of yesterday, we are now shifting to "embarrassing" as the adjective of choice to describe the situation of Whitman and reporters — where we are now seeing prime time television news reports about the avoiding of reporters!  This is not good for Whitman, in my humble opinion, and I know it is not good for the GOP — the latter being my reason for weighing in.

Yesterday Whitman had an "open media" event with Union Pacific at a bay area stockyard.  Needless to say there was heavy attendance from reporters, anxious to talk to the gubernatorial aspirant.  Apparently when they got there, the media was not invited on the stockyard tour, and then was invited to set up to cover a round table between the candidate and railroad representatives.  But when that event was over, the media were shut down in their efforts to ask the candidate even a single question.

I would direct readers to this blog post by ace SF Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci on the Chron’s Politics Blog, with some video worth watching.   A smaller article on the topic appears in the print edition of the Chronicle.  Josh Richman, a very capable reporter from the Oakland Tribune, also writes about it.   But the most startling media coverage of this issue of Whitman avoiding the media comes in the form of two television stories that aired last night (of course, brought to my attention by Whitman’s primary opponent’s campaign).  These reporters actually got phone calls from Whitman apologizing for the incident.  I am including these two stories below.

Here’s a suggestion for candidate Whitman.  All of the California political press corps will be on hand for this weekend’s GOP convention.  Reserve a room, invite them in, and have a lengthy, on-the-record sit down with the whole lot of them — followed with any requested one-on-one’s.  Then this issue will be behind us.

The Republican Party in California has enough challenges without this whole, bizarre, media-avoidance strategy from one of our most prominent candidates.

In closing, I sure hope this column is treated as constructive input to the Whitman campaign, because that is certainly how it is intended to come across.

Here are the two television news stories (again, the video is courtesy of Poizner’s campaign – which I have used because then I don’t have to upload the reports myself.  I also similarly use videos uploaded by the Whitman campaign.  So those descriptions of the videos in big font white lettering are the Poizner campaign putting their title on these clips.).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.