The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

The Democrat and Chronicle carries an op-ed by a local lung association official which urges Randy Kuhl to co-sponsor legislation (HR 1108)  authorizing the Food and Drug administration to regulate cigarettes. This issue was addressed here earlier, and Eric Massa commented on it in a press conference last month.

Congressional Quarterly reports that Eric Massa is one of the recipients of donations from Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership PAC.  According to FEC filings, she gave him $2,500.

Max over at the D&C blog says I'm a "blogo-detractor".  I'm anblogasmic, so let's shorten it to "detractor".  I don't really understand why he posted a Christmas card from Crazytown, but if he wants to make "Nut of the Month Club" a regular feature, I'd tune in for it.

Reader Paige made an excellent comment that highlights some of the failings of the D&C's web presence.

Finally, I really don't understand this post by Kathleen Wagner on the editorial blog.  She's extremely happy that the school superintendent called her personally and was polite on the phone.  Kate, it's called "sucking up", and government officials have been known to do it from time to time.  He's not going to ask you to the Christmas formal or give you a promise ring.

I wrote the Massa campaign and asked them if he had spoken to Rep. Engel.  Here's the response I received from Eric Massa:

No. I have not had the opportunity to speak with Congressman Engel and I stand by my statement.

The real issue here is the fact that Randy Kuhl voted against home heating oil assistance for New Yorkers before he headed South to tour the waterfalls at Iguazu - his focus should be on helping middle class families right here at home.  It's snowing here in Corning, and thousands of New York families are struggling to pay their bills and keep their homes warm through the coldest months of winter.

Kuhl spokesman Meghan Tisinger confirmed via email that the press release quoted by the Ontario Republican was sent out by Rep. Kuhl yesterday morning.

Update:  In case that wasn't clear enough, Massa spokesman Jared Smith added this, "Eric Massa has made absolutely no apologies on this subject and stands by his previous statements."

Max Anderson, an editorial board member and letters-to-the-editor editor at the Democrat and Chronicle, has an interesting post on the D&C's editorial page blog.  Max's main point is one often encountered at the D&C.  He thinks his paper must be doing something right because everybody is mad at it.

Max uses three irrational letters as examples.  Read the post if you want to see the ugly details.  One of the letters is from a conservative, so Max points out that Rochesterturning (a liberal blog) also dislikes the D&C editorial page.  The other two letters are from anti-religious zealots.

Max makes a to-do about the how much pain it caused him to read these letters, but comforts himself by saying that the "rage comes from all sides".  This is both lame and wrong. 

It's lame because Max's job is to read letters from crackpots and kooks, so whining about it in public is pretty wimpy.  Buck up, Max. 

The "rage" excuse is wrong because it paints anyone who complains about the D&C as an irrational, vengeful moron.  It might be comforting to believe that everyone who disagrees with you is crazy, but it isn't true.  I'm sure some of the letters that Max gets are angry, critical and correct.  But when all you see is rage, you're not going to see the truth in some of those letters, and you'll ignore the opportunity to improve that those letters afford.

I can't really blame Max for having this attitude, because it's in the drinking water at the D&C.  In fact, I applaud Max for actually calling out a local blog by name, and linking to it.  The D&C editorial blog usually makes bland references to "what people are saying" rather than pointing to who actually said it.  This is a weasely tactic, because it allows the writer to misrepresent what "people" are saying without letting anyone check what "people" actually said. 

If Max can stop the rage excuse, and continue to link to his critics, he'll have a good chance at achieving the goal of every young D&C staff member:  moving up the Gannett corporate ladder, and getting out of Rochester.

Ontario GOP reprints a Kuhl press release which claims that Eric Massa apologized to Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY-17) for remarks he made about the junket Engel led to Brazil.  During a press call with Brian Tumulty of Gannett Newspapers, Engel said that Massa's comments were a "cheap shot" that "questions his fitness to serve in Congress."

The independent source for the Engel remark, a post on Gannett Reporter Erin Kelly's blog, makes no mention of the apology, but confirms the rest of what Engel said.  The Kuhl press release is not posted to his website.  The Massa campaign website still carries a critique of Kuhl's trip, and the Massa campaign issued a press release a little before noon with a dozen questions for Kuhl on the trip. 

Reader Elmer sends todays' Corning Leader Insider column [pdf] on Randy Kuhl's junket.  The author of the column is a retired Leader reporter who obviously had some fun writing the piece.  At least when you're done reading it, you know where the guy stands, which is a nice counterpoint to today's leaden, wishy-washy D&C editorial.

Today's Democrat and Chronicle editorial on Kuhl's Brazilian junket is an example of everything that's wrong with the D&C's opinion page.  

Editorials exist to set forth a newspaper's position on an issue of the day.  Taking a position implies that you're on one side or the other of an argument.  Here's an example of a decent editorial from today's New York Daily News.   From the headline to the last paragraph, you know what the News wants:  pay raises for state judges.  To get its point across, the News uses a little corny humor in the headline and first paragraph, and it cites facts that support its case.  When it criticizes politicians, its critique is specific and factual.  

The News' editorial is nothing special, but today's D&C effort makes it look positively Shakespearean. The headline, "Brazil trip makes Kuhl an easy target", seems to indicate that the D&C is criticizing the trip.  But the piece is so full of takebacks and qualifications that it's impossible to discern whether the D&C thinks that the trip was a good idea or a bad one.  For example:

Learning how Brazil used ethanol to replace 40 percent of its gasoline supply has merit. Remember, Brazil declared itself independent of Mideast oil in 2005.

Whether Kuhl actually needed to go to Brazil, where sugar cane is used to make ethanol, is quite another story. After all, sugar cane can't be grown in New York state.

So which is it, guys?  Is a trip to Brazil relevant or not?   If you don't have an opinion on the core justification for the trip, why did you write about it in the first place?

Where the News uses facts to support its arguments, the D&C inserts them at random.  For example, it points out that a new ethanol plant is opening in Orleans county, and draws this non-conclusion:

While there is a huge difference between corn and sugar cane, there is something to be said for gaining knowledge about ethanol of all varieties.

There might be something to be said, but the D&C doesn't say it.  Meaningless catchphrases like "there is something to be said" are no substitutes for taking a stand.  Even worse is "this page prefers", which is the smug newspaper equivalent of the royal "We".

The only thing that's clear from the D&C's editorial is that they think there's something distasteful about the whole discussion.  The term "sniping" is used twice, which implies that the story is only on the editorial page because Massa keeps bringing it up.  This ignores the fact that the Washington Post was there first, and it's also a red herring.  Massa's reaction has no bearing on whether Kuhl's trip was worthwhile.  But the D&C is so afraid of appearing to criticize Kuhl that they have to criticize Massa to balance things out. 

As the old-timers used to say, "a good editorial is like a ladies' dress, long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting."   Today's D&C effort wouldn't even make Project Runway.

Ontario GOP has a couple of posts on that challenge Democrats on Iraq.  Both relate to some comments made by John Murtha earlier this week.  Murtha said the following:

I think the 'surge' is working [...] But the thing that has to happen is the Iraqis have to do this themselves. We can't win it for them.

I agree with this assessment.  At the moment, we are at the peak of our deployment in Iraq, and we've also changed tactics by working with whatever faction wants to work with us.  Violence is down.   But, as I said in mid-November, the issue is the Iraqis.  The surge was sold as a way to give Iraqis "breathing room" so they can form an effective government. All they've been doing lately is squabbling among themselves. 

Read today's Washington Post story on Iraq, and you'll find the current spat is over a Sunni member of parliament who is under house arrest because one of his security guards was found with keys to a car bomb.  The little conflicts change, but the big story remains: the Iraqis haven't decided how to divvy up the land or the resources in their country.  And it's not clear that our presence there is making them work any faster.

The surge is a successful tactic in support of a strategy that's been a failure for years.  The government in Iraq just isn't working, and the question is how much longer we can afford to pour the vast majority of our military and diplomatic resources into one tiny country.   The Democrats' answer in Iraq is no more, and Massa and others are saying that our presence is just delaying an inevitable partition into Sunni, Shiite and Kurd regions.  The Republicans' answer is more of the same will someday lead to a strong central government.  I think the Democrats' position is the better choice between two crummy alternatives, and the polls say that most of the country still agrees.

Politically, the success of the surge will only hurt Democrats if they fail to make the distinction between tactics and strategy.  If the Democrats are afraid to acknowledge tactical facts, such as a decline of violence in Iraq, then they leave themselves open to the charge, which GOP makes against MoveOn.org, that they're burying their heads in the sand.  GOP also calls Murtha's change of opinion a "flip flop".  From the quotes he uses, I think Murtha is just stating facts, not changing position.  In June, he said that he saw no evidence that the surge is working, as a military tactic.  In November, he now says he sees evidence.  In both cases, he points to the real strategic issue:  progress by the Iraqi government.  He knows the difference between strategy and tactics, one that Republicans constantly blur in their quest to spin the latest news from Iraq.

GOP also mentions the recent MoveOn campaign against Brian Baird (D-WA-3).  MoveOn spend $20K in Baird's cheap media market to chastise him for changing his position on Iraq, based on the effectiveness of the surge.  I think the MoveOn campaign is a waste of resources, but that's nothing new for that ham-fisted bunch.   MoveOn's ads in the 29th last cycle contained a error that gave Randy Kuhl an excuse to play the victim.  As a political movement, MoveOn is mostly a noise machine appealing to a core constituency who are already politically active.  Real change will come from political movements that are able to get new faces to the polls.  I see no evidence that MoveOn is able to do that.

The Washington Post's Al Kamen has an update on Randy Kuhl's junket.  Yesterday, the delegation cruised the Amazon river.  Kamen also reports that one more congressman, Clifford Stearns (R-FL-6) also tagged along.  For those keeping track, Cliff is in his 10th term and won re-election by a safe 20% margin last election.

Randy's official blog also has a post, dated Thursday, that discusses his trip.  He makes the following point:

It is important to note that while Brazil developed ethanol from sugarcane, the natural resource available in Brazil, the US can learn to develop our natural resources, such as switch grass and other cellulosic feed stocks, in a similar fashion.

This is a bit of spin.  As Massa explained in his press conference on Wednesday, the process to produce ethanol from sugarcane is much different than the cellulosic process.  The cellulosic or enzymatic process uses bacteria to break down the cellulose into sugars that are then turned into alcohol.  This first step is the "big deal", because it lessens the amount of energy used, and allows us to use many more crops to make ethanol. 

(h/t: to Rochesterturning on the Kamen column)

Rochester, the birthplace of the Gannett empire, is now the home of another giant media company:  Gatehouse Media.  Gatehouse owns almost every paper in the district, except for the two Gannett papers.   Because Gatehouse specializes in small-town newspapers, it's interesting to compare their little guy strategy with the Democrat and Chronicle's.

Here's one telling example.  When YouTube hit, video on the Internet was suddenly easy.  Both the D&C and a Gatehouse paper, the Messenger-Post, recognized that.  The D&C handled it by hiring "multimedia man", a "backpack journalist", who creates video-only reports which appear in the D&C's walled multimedia garden.    Actually, the D&C is so insecure about this guy that they put him in a walled garden within a walled garden.  His stories appear in a section of the RocMen that I can't even link to.  I can only link to individual video stories in the D&C Multimedia section.

The Messenger-Post took an entirely different tack.  They give their print reporters cheap cameras and had them add video to their stories.  The M-P treats video as a complement to the print story.  One good example is yesterday's coverage of an accident at a local ice warehouse.   Here's a better one:  a feature on a local sword swallower.  You don't have to watch the video to understand the story, but if you're interested in the story, watching the video adds more detail.  It's not always done perfectly, but the sword swallower piece is as near a perfect fusion as I've seen.

All of the M-P's videos are posted on YouTube.  Like the rest of the M-P's content, video is licensed under a Creative Commons license that makes it free for non-commercial use.  In other words, the M-P wants the rest of the Internet to link to, and use, its content.  Their response to new technology is to embrace it and use it to make their stories better.  The D&C's response is to wall it off in an inaccessible ghetto and forget about it.

By the way, the reason I know that Gatehouse gives its reporters cheap cameras is because I read it on Howard Owens' blog.  Howard is Gatehouse's director of digital publishing, an experienced journalist, and a smart, thoughtful guy.  I like the pragmatism of his take on disruptive video strategy.  Money quote:

Here is my brief definition of disruption: “The basic idea of disruption is to start at the low end, fulfilling a job to be done, with a product that is just ‘good enough.’”
[...]

• Rely on current news room staff, who know news and story telling
• Provide starter training, improving as we go
• Don't get bogged down in trying to be like TV

The D&C's strategy is the opposite of this, and it shows.   Because the D&C treats video like some kind of obscure add-on, we're unlikely to see video of town hall meetings, press conferences or debates.