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Entries for the 'Raleigh ' Category
Gary Pearce posted on July 29, 2010 08:16
So let’s talk about what Raleigh’s buzzing about this week:
Is there some kind of statutory deadline in the Mike Easley case this month – that is, tomorrow?
Is something coming from the U.S. Attorney?
Is this investigation ever going to end?
Is George Holding holding on until President Obama’s second term?
Is Washington getting impatient with the timing and scope of the investigation?
Is there some kind of negotiation going on between Holding’s office and Easley?
Is Easley’s fabled Irish luck going to hold out one more time?
Capital buzzers and buzzards long to know.
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Gary Pearce posted on July 28, 2010 07:40
“Controlled choice” is all the buzz now in the Wake schools debate.
This has the whiff of one of those oxymoronic (with the emphasis on “moron”) political/policy phrases that sounds great but never quite works out in practice.
Remember George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism”?
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Gary Pearce posted on July 27, 2010 10:16
My blog about the capital press corps – and how its coverage of the Alcoa story might have been influenced by UNC-TV’s Eszter Vajda – brought this response from Scott Mooneyham of The Insider/Capitol Press Association. I think it’s worth reprinting in full.
Background: I had quoted a blog by Laura Leslie about how the depleted numbers of the press corps required them to work together.
Gary,
You should know that Eszter Vajda does not and has not ever worked in the leg building press room, which is where the cooperation of which Laura was referring takes place. The eight press corps member of whom she speaks does not include anyone from UNC-TV, which maybe further makes the point that I have made -- you can't be called a journalist while on the gov't payroll.
Suggesting that Eszter influenced press corps coverage of Alcoa is akin to saying, "Look at that tail chasing his dog." I don't think anyone in the press corps even knew about Eszter's "documentary" or that she was working on something associated with Alcoa until Fletcher Hartsell issued his subpoena. I and others have been writing for roughly two years on the issue of FERC relicensing and attempts by Hartsell, Gov. Perdue and Stan Bingham to block it. I've had many conversations with many people about it -- Hartsell, Bingham, Bruce Thompson, Chuck Neely, Gene Ellis, Angie Harris, Larry Jones. I haven't spoken once to Eszter Vajda about it.
As for press corps cooperation, I suspect what Laura means is that the people in the press room generally help each other keep track of things like votes, quickly called committee meetings to hear important pieces of legislation, and share information about bills that might have been stripped and become something new. So, for example, the video poker bill is being debated, the debate has gone on for an hour, and some press corps members have tuned out the debate temporarily to talk briefly with a lobbyist about where some other bill is going, etc. Joe Hackney says, "Further comment, further debate? The question before the House is .." And someone who is still listening yells, "VOTE!" Or, Laura will play back on her audio equipment some quote or exchange that we all heard, but wanted to make sure we got correctly. Or, some press corps member will say, out loud in the press room, "Why are they taking up a bill to regulate funerals, now?" And someone will respond, "They stripped that. It's a $500 million incentives bill now."
That doesn't mean that the press corps holds a staff meeting to decide how coverage will go for the day. It doesn't mean that Mark Binker shares with me that he's learned that banking commissioners are set to get bonuses, or that I share with him that I've found out that Fred Steen is the legislator who filed an ethics complaint alleging attempted bribery.
Laura may be right that there is more cooperation today than in 2004, but I don't think it is something new either. I believe there is more cooperation in 2004 than there was in 2001 and more in 2001 than in 1998, when I started there. If the point of that cooperation is accuracy, what's the problem?
Regards,
Scott Mooneyham
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Gary Pearce posted on July 26, 2010 16:22
Have I missed it? Or has somebody done – and released – a poll of Wake County voters on the school debate?
Most people I run into take it as a matter of faith that the board’s new direction reflects a minority opinion in the county.
True, it was the election for just four board seats that turned things around so dramatically.
But I have a feeling that there is a swing bloc of voters in the middle of this issue. They agree that resegregated schools would be bad. And they share the frustration over school assignments. What they don’t get is whether the two views can be squared.
The opponents of the new board need to understand those voters, because that’s who will ultimately decide what happens.
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Gary Pearce posted on July 23, 2010 09:40
There are two kinds of political leaders: uniters and dividers.
Barack Obama is a uniter; Sarah Palin, a divider. Jim Hunt was a uniter; Jesse Helms, a divider. Ronald Reagan was a uniter; George W. Bush, a divider.
Dividers can succeed in politics. But they don’t leave lasting legacies of accomplishment.
The leaders of the WakeCounty school board, Ron Margiotta and John Tedesco, don’t get this.
They don’t realize that if they talked to their critics, instead of arresting them, they might achieve their goals – or at least move in that direction.
One of the most valuable lessons Jim Hunt taught me is never burn your bridges. You never know when today’s opponent might be tomorrow’s ally.
Margiotta and Tedesco are sowing the seeds of their own failure. The disruption they’ve fueled could well hurt the schools’ performance. What truly qualified professional educator would want to be superintendent in this environment?
If the Wake schools fail, Margiotta and Tedesco will get the blame. They’ll be out of power, out of office and in for years of infamy.
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Gary Pearce posted on July 21, 2010 13:30
Laura Leslie of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC is a great reporter and one of my favorite bloggers. She recently had a post about the capital media that is worth attention.
Since 2004, she wrote, the legislative press corps’ ranks have dropped from 20-something to, at the end of this year’s session, eight. That brought a sea change in how those reporters work:
“The competitive urge is still there in spades, but it’s different these days. We’ve learned to work together because, after round after round of cuts in the industry, we have to. Cooperation is the only way 8 people can keep tabs on 170 legislators, ad hoc committee meetings, and the dozens of floor amendments that fly by in a 19-hour session.”
This raises a question: Was the entire press corps’ approach to the Alcoa story influenced by UNC-TV's Eszter Vajda, whose unedited reports were critical of the company?
Will Alcoa’s FOIA request unearth communications between Vajda and other reporters? The press corps might learn the hard way what it’s like when your emails go public.
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Gary Pearce posted on July 21, 2010 09:44
Forty years ago, I took part in an antiwar protest at the State Capitol after Kent State. Yesterday, my 17-year-old daughter took part in the Wake schools protest at the Capitol.
So I’ve been amused by Carter’s blogs about teenagers being “used” by adults angry at the new school board’s assignment policy.
My experience raising teenagers is that you can’t “use” them to do anything. Or make them do much of anything they don’t want to do.
The real message here is that the new board’s steamroller has run into a wall of anger and protest – which may show up on Election Day in November.
I don’t believe the board’s new leaders – Carter calls them “the Italians” – are evil people. And I don’t buy bashing them as outsiders “not from here” who “don’t understand our values.”
But there’s an underlying truth to that criticism. Margiotta & Co. clearly haven’t made the effort to know their audience – black and white Southerners who remember the civil rights and school desegregation battles of 50 years ago.
And teenaged students who have learned what those battles meant.
Republicans take note: The 16- and 17-year-olds who were being “used” at yesterday’s protest will be voting to reelect Barack Obama in two years.
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Carter Wrenn posted on July 20, 2010 10:11
Everyday the bru-ha-ha between our local Progressives and the Italian transplants on the School Board gets more entertaining – the whole thing’s turned into a microcosm of modern life with far-left Liberals, Democrats, Progressives, Italians, Southerners, far-right Republicans, NAACP Reverends, a Duke Professor and a liberal Baptist Church all going at one another tooth and nail and now the caldron is complete – the teenagers have joined the fray.
By forming their own coalition – H.E.A.T – or Hero’s Emerging Amongst Teenagers to march arm-in-arm with the Progressives and the NAACP at their demonstration today.
The young people held their first meeting the other night at the local anti-Italian headquarters (at Pullen Park Baptist Church) and without wasting a second ripped into the Italians saying the new School Board leaders are out to “destroy public education.”
A young lady explained how grateful she is to the old School Board for busing her “forty minutes to Apex for diversity reasons when she was younger” and another student – who clearly has a future in politics – told the crowd the students were “fighting the oppressors of Wake County;” the next morning it all landed in the News and Observer, bringing back fond memories of being seventeen and fighting oppression which in the days of my youth (circa 1970) meant fighting the local draft board.
Leaving aside stopping for a moment to contemplate the possible results of letting sixteen year olds set school policy, I have to say this all looks helpful to the Italians – because even if they are Yankees they haven’t dragged young people into this fight as schills to get favorable publicity in the newspaper – which our good southern ‘Progressives” and NAACP Reverends have done without a qualm.
This is politics and it’s the modern age and it’s for sure anything goes but using sixteen year olds to deliver rhetorical bombs in the press does seem stooping a little low.
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Carter Wrenn posted on July 14, 2010 17:36
The Right Honorable (and Colorful) Reverend William Barber (head of the local NAACP) has laid the political birch-wood to the Italians on the School Board again; the Reverend Barber, who’s been holding demonstrations and protests lampooning the Italians, climbed up on his soap-box at his latest protest and announced the Italians are taking Raleigh back to the 1950’s and the age of segregated water fountains.
That so inspired the Reverend Barber’s friend Reverend Mendez that he hopped up and said he agreed with Barber and it was clear what the demonstrators were fighting was something just plumb “extremely evil.”
Reverend Mendez didn’t bother to explain why the Italians are extremely evil (as opposed to just wrong-headed) except to say they are ‘divisive’ – which is how the School Board must feel about Reverend Barber.
Next the prospect of battling the evil Italians got Reverend Barber’s aide-de-camp Reverend Chip Gateward (who last week called Italian School Board Chairman Ron Margiotta a “white racist”) so worked up he stood up waving a sign showing black and white water fountains and waxed eloquent saying there’s no way, no how, he’s sitting still while the Italian turn back the clock to the days of Jim Crow.
Finally the Reverend Michael Hunn – speaking on behalf of 50,000 Episcopalians – got up and explained how the story of the Good Samaritan and virtues of the ‘diversity’ (the former School Board’s policy that leads to busing which the Italians are ending) are the same.
Why that’s so wasn’t clear either.
As I get older I’m thinking a lot of politics is just plain social. An excuse for folks to get together. And that the brouhaha between the Reverends and the Italians is a good example. Of course, both sides wrap themselves up in ideology and talk about sacred causes and how they’re battling to save their version of Western Civilization – and, no doubt that is one reason folks are holding demonstrations. But I’m beginning to think the greater reason may be they simply enjoy getting together. At least, one thing is clear: The three Reverends are having the time of their lives demonstrating and protesting and calling their enemies evil.
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Gary Pearce posted on July 07, 2010 09:46
It’s Reporter Versus Reporter. UNC-TV versus UNC Radio. And the best drama of the legislative session.
Senator Fletcher Hartsell’s inspired idea to subpoena UNC-TV’s unaired Alcoa story stirred up great mischief. It:
- Put Alcoa in an unwelcome spotlight
- Put UNC-TV in an unwelcome spotlight
- Put a UNC radio reporter at odds with a UNC-TV.
“Vajda claimed in her affidavit that she has decided to cooperate ‘without waiving my right to exercise my journalist’s privilege.’ That’s like deciding to have a car wreck without waiving your good driver’s discount. You can’t have it both ways.”
Then Leslie zeroed in on Vajda’s bosses at the station:
“I'm still wondering how half-hour segments on local golf clubs, botanical gardens, and the AndyGriffithMuseum rated higher on UNC-TV's priority list than allegations of contamination in one of NC's most popular lakes. The station had the resources to air all those segments in May, but nothing on Alcoa. So help me out here.”
Plus, Leslie blasted UNC-TV for “(rolling) over in record time with barely a whimper” to the subpoena.
This year’s Press Corps Follies should be interesting.
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