January 20, 2007

Bad News Coming
By Jack D. McNamara

Winter temperatures plunged Monday night. The coldest weather yet appeared to accompany the pols’ fortunes for the coming year.

No one any longer believes anything the Bush Administration says about Iraq. They say a lot; indeed they babble endlessly and erroneously. With great fanfare and hype the Administration’s spokespersons come forward with the plan of the week. Before the next morning’s news has been broadcast an inconvenient fact intrudes to prove them wrong.

In Austin the great news last week was to be the overthrow of the unpleasant Texas Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tom Craddick of Midland. The news surfaced about Christmas that with the loss of a half dozen seats to the Democrats on November 7 the way might be clear to split the Republican majority and elect a less dictatorial Speaker. Texas newspapers were full of the maneuverings as Republican Brian McCall of Plano and then Jim Pitts of Waxahatchie solicited dissidents to the cause of revolt.

But the dice came up snake eyes when the dissidents lost a simple procedural vote. The Pitts effort wanted a secret ballot of the 149 members (one seat as yet undetermined) and when that effort failed all the Republicans and even some of the Democrats stampeded back to support of Craddick. Faced with a public vote in the Texas House, about five dozen representatives decided they did not want to be publicly identified as anti-Craddick.

On the final vote for Speaker Craddick, only 27 Democrats voted “nay.” Among them was our State Representative Pete P. Gallego.

Here in the Big Bend we learned by way of the Austin Chronicle newspaper that our local National Public Radio entrepreneurs, KTRS 93.5 FM, were in a heap of trouble, despite the ballyhooed beginning of a year ago with Dan Rather and Willie Nelson in the center ring.

All for naught. They don’t even have a license yet. Worse yet, the Big Bend Sentinel was stonewalled by the station’s managers as we learned from last week’s Big Bend Sentinel editorial. All over the Big Bend we had heard of troubles on the rumor and tom-tom beat. But the story was dumped in Austin rather than here at home.

Now KTRS is an entity which will have a responsibility for news. That is how they will get a license is by promising to do some news. They failed that duty in their first attempt.

All is not lost, however. American journalism is a field of activity with an almost infinite capacity for the toleration of error. This toleration is embedded in the First Amendment. Though we are often embarrassed by the bias, incompetence, dishonesty, viciousness and stupidity of journalism and journalists, no one is authorized to suppress them (not yet at least … the Bush Administration has two more years).

We, meaning the Nimby News, receive many complaints concerning the wayward press. We usually respond with our maxim — Bad journalism is better than no journalism at all. This observation is related to another ancient maxim — Even a blind hog finds an acorn sometimes.

The point is that our system of government encourages commentary on public matters to such an extent that even false statements enjoy constitutional protection unless the false statements are made knowingly or with reckless disregard as to whether the statement is true or not.

As we see here in Alpine on a daily basis, journalistic ignorance and incompetence are complete defenses.

Many persons caught up in the whirl of bad news believe that silence is the best course. This belief is often grounded in the false assumption that if you don’t say anything the journalists can’t write or broadcast a story. Public entities, like radio stations, police agencies, and other public figures cannot prevent news reports of their problems. If a story cannot be reported from the poobahs it can certainly be reported from other facts.

Once upon a time I was writing a story for Texas Observer about former Presidio County Sheriff Rick Thompson, who said frequently that former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm, who retired two years ago, appointed him to a U.S. Marshal’s screening committee. Because Thompson had been sentenced to life in prison for narcotics trafficking I thought I ought to check the factual basis of Thompson’s claim before I published it. So I called Senator Gramm’s Washington office, identified myself and the Observer, and asked the senator’s spokesman if it was true that Thompson was a senatorial appointee.

The senatorial spokesman, on the public payroll, politely told me (whom he did not know) that he was so sorry but the senator did not respond to questions from the Observer.

Reporters often come upon such blacklisting but they usually do not encounter public officials who admit it. No experienced public official maintains such a policy for long without becoming an object of mockery.

After I caught my breath I returned to the telephone and called a half dozen or so U.S. Senate offices, including the office of the majority leader at the time, Senator Bob Dole and the other Texan in the Senate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen. I related the Gramm policy and we had a jolly laugh with the respective spokespersons. I was reasonably convinced that the joke would be told around the Capitol and the watering holes of Washington, D.C. And I wrote the anecdote as a sidebar to the Observer story.

On his next trip to Alpine, Senator Gramm held a press conference in the state district courtroom. I asked him a potentially embarrassing question, he answered candidly and fully, and I thank him for the experience.

There is a lot of bad news awaiting us out there in 2007. State Representative Pete P. Gallego’s committee appointments may be one of those bad news stories. Who supported U.S. Representative Ciro Rodriguez (who was assigned to both the Appropriations and the Veteran’s committees) and who did not is another story.

The best way to deal with bad news is to deal with it and get on. General Creighton Abrams said as he wrapped up the Vietnam debacle, “Bad news doesn’t improve with age.”

And they named a great tank after him. •

(Also published by the Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa, Texas January 18, 2007.)