Sunday, March 05, 2006

The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon

For Judge Parker, anyway.

You wouldn't know this from today's paper, but Iowa's Democrats held caucuses yesterday. In Iowas largest county, the current governor's annointed successor failed to attract enough support to even have his votes counted, while upstart Ed Fallon's shoestring operation defeated the prosperous Culver campaign. Bacon has some details.

The Register's editorial staff couldn't squeeze this into today's paper. Yes, the lead story on slot machines deserves front page coverage (and they deserve kudos for pursuing this issue). Sure, they always put their big feature on page 1 on Sundays (Black people in Charles City!). But the other stories on the front page - Iowa has murky rivers, and maybe Pat Tillman's friendly fire death was a negligent homicide, rather than an accident - that's hardly stop-the-presses stuff. I don't need the NIDU to tell me the Raccoon River is brown.

Surely, though, the Fallon win would be on the front of the "Metro and Iowa" section, no? No. We instead learn that a bunch of bills proposed in the legislature won't pass this year - (like they all do in other years?) and that there was an anti-diabetes fund raiser and a telethon yesterday.

As far as I can tell, there isn't a single line in today's paper on the Fallon caucus victory, and Blouin's shockingly bad showing. There's no excuse for this. They can't say that it happened too late in the day to cover, as they had no trouble getting in last night's basketball results from Boulder and St. Louis. It's either incredibly bad news judgment or a bullheaded refusal to do anything to cover the Fallon campaign. I suppose it could even be both.

While I think Fallon is by far the best candidate the Democrats have, I'm unlikely to vote for him in November. When campaigns complain about press coverage, my instinct is always that it's sour grapes. But this is really bad, and the Fallon campaign has every right to be irate.

But we can still depend on the Register for Judge Parker.

2 comments:

Brent said...

Um, in case you didn't get the memo..the Register SUCKS! Just saying is all...

Anonymous said...

The Register may or may not suck (k...does) but you'll notice that Beaumont and Co...as well as AP, Gazette and others, had scant to no coveage of the conventions because the conventional wisdom is that they will not matter.

Culver, Blouin, Fallon...whomever, one of these guys will get 35 percent and will have to tussle with Nussle.

As to Blouin not logging numbers in Polk...I don't dismiss its significance, but I also don't think Blouin put a lot of emphasis on it...I mean he spoke after people broke into preference groups for goodness sake.

My thought...the conventional thought, I think...is that Blouin is (finally) getting his feet underneath him, has a campaign manager that has a clue and is ascending...going to make a heckuva a showdown with Culver and Fallon I would say, but one of them will emerge, if for no other reason than we all know how horrible a caucus...and not knowing who Nussle was facing 'till August...would be.