Jack Betts says Gov. Mike Easley is ducking questions.
In a column Sunday, the Charlotte Observer editor notes that Easley has "chosen not to answer questions" about the failure of mental health reform.
The governor's office didn't think an interview would be productive, and declined the request. "It was our sense here in the press office that there wasn't going to be an opportunity for the governor to talk about solutions, but quite frankly more about the blame game, and that was not where the governor wanted to go," said Seth Effron, spokesman for Easley.
On his This Old State blog, Betts adds more from Effron, including his statement that the press would be more interested in talking about problems than solutions.
"We’ll never know now, of course, but it’s hard to imagine that the newspaper wouldn’t have wanted to know what the governor was going to do about it, and how quickly," Betts writes.
Comments
Re: Betts: Governor ducks questions
March 4, 2008 - 7:28am — ProctorSeth Effron's speciality seems to be in withholding information rather than in providing it when it is justifiable to do so. Now he is going to decide what the press is going to do with a story before any articles are actually written. This is a neat variation on the ill-founded doctrine of prior restraint: the governor's press office is going to help "protect the public" from unpredictable news coverage by news reporters by reducing or restricting the flow of information legitimately requested by the press for the purposes of reporting on the progress of state government in general and the Governor's Office in particular.
Public officials are not obliged to answer every single query posed by reporters on issues bearing upon motivation or philosophical reasoning about public issues, but governmental press offices quickly get on shaky ground when they engage in lecturing reporters on how to do their jobs.
Effron is a worthy opponent for anyone wishing to engage in a good old-fashioned tug-of-war involving the news business, and perhaps one day he will teach a journalism or political science course in press-government relations. But as long he is part of the governor's press office, state government reporters can figure that he will give them about as much "fodder" as backyard birds can anticipate getting on days when the birdseed is just about to run out.
One of the most thrilling journalism "sports" back in the days of Fayetteville newspapering in the 1970s was trying to exchange appropriate information between the newsrooms of the morning Fayetteville Times and the afternoon Fayetteville Observer, which were published separately six days a week and combined into one "Fayetteville Observer-Times" edition on Sunday. As a Fayetteville Observer editorial writer during the week, I was in charge of selecting nationally syndicated opinion columns for the Sunday Observer-Times, one thing I really wanted for the "Observer-Times" editorial pages was the Sunday column by James Reston of the New York Times, whose news service, under the Fasyetteville newspapers' arrangement at the time, was allocated to the Fayetteville Times newsroom.
I could get David Broder's column from the Washington Post, excellent then as now, through the Observer's own Washington Post news service, but the person I had to go to in order to beam Scotty Reston's New York Times column up to the Observer office for use on the Sunday Observer-Times editorial pages was none other than our popular, witty and bulldog-like colleague of the Times, Seth Effron. He wasn't thrilled about giving up that column for the combined Sunday editorial section, perhaps having preferred to hold it for the Fayetteville Times' own Monday editorial page. But I was always grateful to get that Scotty Reston column for the Sunday paper even if Effron wasn't all that happy to part with it.
So here's my advice to any reporters from the Charlotte Observer or The News & Observer who may set about the task of prying loose some timely information from the Governor's Press Office: try to entice the New York Times into doing a story of its own on the topic at hand because our gubernatorial press office always seems happy to fulfill any national news media requests for useful information about Gov. Easley's position on important issues in North Carolina state government.
David McKnight