In today's Syracuse Post-Standard, the
Washington notebook column solves the he said/she said dilemma by simply ignoring the other side of the story. Columnist Mark Weiner re-prints National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spin without analysis or balance.
The main subject of Weiner's piece NY-25, where it looks like there won't be a primary. This means that Democrat Dan Maffei, who came within a few thousand votes of beating incumbent Jim Walsh in 2006, will be the candidate in the general election. The NRCC spin is that this is a good thing, because Maffei's possible primary challenger, Syracuse Mayor Matt Driscoll, would have been a better candidate.
Perhaps there's a tiny bit of truth in that, but fact-based conventional wisdom is that primaries eat up campaign chests and bloody up primary opponents, so the lack of a primary in NY-25 is probably good news for Dan Maffei. Since Weiner is writing a column, which is an opinion piece, he could have just said that. Or he could have called up Maffei and gotten a reaction quote. Either way, getting some factual balance into his column would have been easy, so he's either a biased or incompetent "analyst".
The NRCC and its Democratic counterpart, the DCCC, are full of spokespeople whose entire job is to spin any seemingly negative fact for their party into a positive. For example, the Democrat just won a special election for Denny Hastert's old seat in the Illinois 14th. The NRCC
spent nearly 20% of their cash on hand defending the seat. The last time a party lost the Speaker's seat,
in 1994, it signaled the beginning of a dozen years of Republican dominance in the House. Clearly, this is bad news. The NRCC's
response is typical: "one state does not prove a trend [...] not a bellewether of what happens this Fall."
I don't fault the NRCC for spinning NY-25 or IL-14. But journalists should not be basing entire columns on what these people say.
By the way, I stumbled on this piece because Weiner mentions NY-29, saying that Kuhl is running despite widespread retirement rumors. He got that right, at least.