Q1. If North Dakota Governor John Hoeven disappeared for five days, how would we know? If he disappeared for five weeks, how would we know? If he disappeared for five months, how would we know?
A1. Let's be honest about this; we wouldn't know. Or, if we found out, we wouldn't find out for a long, long time. You know how we'd eventually find out?!? There would be a groundbreaking ceremony for some federally-funded project brought to us by Conrad, Dorgan and/or Pomeroy, and Hoeven would be absent from all the pictures. Hoeven wouldn't be standing at the podium taking credit for a project he had little or nothing to do with. That's when most of us would start asking questions. That's when I'd start getting worried about who was running North Dakota's executive branch.
Q2. If North Dakota Governor John Hoeven ran off for five days to Argentina (or Arnegard) to have an affair, not telling anybody or leaving contact information, how would we know?
A2. Again, let's be honest; we wouldn't know. You look at the situation in South Carolina, and you see what it takes to get the media to even start looking into a story like the Sanford debacle. South Carolina's largest newspaper -- "The State" -- had scandalous e-mails between Sanford and his mistress for six months and wrote nothing about it because they didn't have the intellectual firepower necessary to confirm the validity of the emails. It took a major national story on all the networks about his disappearance for a couple reporters at The State to finally try to do something.
That would never happen here in North Dakota. Think about it; Which North Dakota reporters would follow up on a story like that? Seriously. And if they did, which newspaper would publish the story?
None.
Q3. If North Dakota's Governor John Hoeven did what Mark Sanford did, which intrepid North Dakota investigative reporter would do the type of work done by Gina Smith in South Carolina to break the story of Mark Sanford's whereabouts?
A3. First, I should probably tell you who Gina Smith is. The best way to do that is probably to have you watch Rachel Maddow's interview with Ms. Smith last night. Here's the interview (she shows up at about 3:30 in the recording):
Did you hear that? After six months of having those e-mails [and doesn't Sanford say this was something his family had been dealing with "for five months"? The emails seem to suggest quite a bit of this developed more than six month ago.], Smith drove three and a half hours to Atlanta, Georgia, to wait at the international terminal where she had deduced that Sanford MIGHT arrive IF, in fact, he was returning from Argentina.
Which spitfire North Dakota reporter would have the journalistic drive, gumption and savvy to even start doing the legwork done by Smith? And wouldn't you agree that, on some level, Smith just got lucky. She had a cohort at another airport waiting for Sanford. Sanford might have come in on a later flight. To some extent, she just got lucky. But she wouldn't even have been in a position to get lucky if she hadn't put in the time and a little effort. There's no chance a North Dakota reporter would ever do that kind of legwork, hoping to just get lucky.
None.
Why? First, North Dakota would have to have a journalist who'd notice Hoeven was missing. Wouldn't happen. Second, North Dakota would have to have a journalist who'd recognize that it's a newsworthy story when a state's governor has gone missing. Wouldn't happen. Third, North Dakota would have to have a journalist who'd know there might be tasks and research and follow-up that needed to get done in order to "work up" the story. Wouldn't happen. Fourth, North Dakota would need to have a journalist with the smarts to figure out what those things are. Not gonna happen. And lastly, we'd have to have a journalist that could write a decent investigative piece based upon all of the above, and some legwork and a little luck. I don't think we have an investigative journalist in North Dakota with one of these powers of observation, research and skill, let alone most or all of them in one reporter.
And even if we did, that reporter would probably be shut down by an editor, publisher or producer who lived next door to the Governor or who was best friends with the Governor's dad.
Our governor could have an extramarital affair, lie about it to his staff (or not), use state funds and resources to pay his expenses and nobody would ever know about it.
Ever.
The Sanford story isn't a story about a governor who had an affair; It's a story about the dumb luck of one rare newspaper reporter in South Carolina, after she and her employer sat on salacious, incriminating emails for six months. I suspect most people didn't want to hear the details of Gov. Sanford's sins. That story is a story about monumental (though typical) Republican "party of family values" hypocrisy. Democrats can never have a story like this, because they've never claimed to be the "party of family values." We -- Democrats -- don't talk like that because we don't think we're any better or any worse, morally, than Republicans. (We think we're all equal. You know, like the constitution says we are.) You do this to yourself when you invent and then wear the "family values" crown. People would hardly care about this story but for the fact Sanford ran "family values" ads during his campaign, voted to impeach Clinton and called for resignations from virtually any married man that so much as glanced at a pretty girl in Washington D.C. Sanford is the king of the glass house stone throwers.
But like many news stories, the Sanford meltdown does little more and little less than shine the spotlight on what's wrong with mainstream media news in America; especially local media and especially North Dakota's media. The reason people are becoming less and less willing to pay for news anymore is that we don't get the news even when we pay for it. We don't get the news ESPECIALLY when we pay for it. A big part of this Sanford story is that it shines a white-hot spotlight on the overall, general failures of the media. They don't get the story because of hard investigative journalism; they get the story because of anonymous tipsters -- probably a blogger in this case (or maybe Sanford's wife, or a "friend" of hers -- and plain. old. dumb. luck.
I think the media should view this story as an opportunity to take a long, hard look at itself and its flaws.
Not Sanford's.
I don't much care about the political carnage going on in South Carolina right now, except when I think about North Dakota, North Dakota's Governor and the media in North Dakota. I've been thinking about how a similar story might play out in North Dakota. In thinking about it, I've come up with some questions I think we should all ask ourselves. We should also ask these questions of each other, and of the reporters in North Dakota's media:
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