Politicians love to deflect blame when they err or get caught with their hand in the cookie jar and they always try to put the blame on the media for daring to expose the truth.
This past weekend, Commissioner Bobby Williams went on the radio and said that the media does not present anything other than negative accounts of the government.
“They don’t do stories about all the good things we get done,” Williams moaned.
Like what, Mr. Williams?
The host of the show chimed in, adding: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
I absolutely must take exception to that statement; it simply is not true.
Now, I cannot speak for the national media, almost all of whom would eat a dead rat sandwich with a side of fresh cow manure on live television if it would score half a percentage point in the ratings.
Local media does not work that way. The story of a murder-suicide is certainly more compelling and emotional than the ribbon cutting of a new hair salon; however, Bobby Williams would like to have you believe the local news media cheers on people murdering one another because we want to sell more ads.
I can offer up my friend and colleague Charmain Brackett and her online paper “Augusta Good News” as an example. Augusta Good News, as its name suggests, publishes only feature or “feel good” stories. The last time I checked, Charmain’s little digital rag is doing just fine without printing anything that “bleeds.”
The truth is that positive news stories about political or governmental figures attract just as many eyes and sell just as many ads as do articles that focus on the negative. In the past, I have written about the excellent public service of retired Canal Authority Executive Director Dayton Sherrouse, Greater Augusta Arts Council Director Brenda Durant and North Augusta Mayor Briton Williams, and those articles were as widely read as anything else I have written.
When I proposed launching the “Something you may not have known” series, our publisher, Joe Edge, told me I must be bored, saying, “I don’t think people really care that much about history.”
As it turns out, that was one of the very few times that Joe was proven to be wrong.
Back in the old days, the only way for a newspaper to gauge what was being read and what was being ignored was the number of letters to the editor received in response to a particular article.
These days, modern technology allows us to track not only how many people click on an article, the data will also tell us how many people actually scrolled down and read the entire piece.
We were all surprised to learn that the top read story in our first year of publication was not any of the stories written about former Mayor Hardie Davis Jr. and his shenanigans; rather, it was an article about an invasive lizard.
As a near lifelong resident of Augusta, I am keenly aware that people with the potential to invest in our city, build a new factory and create jobs or even accept a job working for the city read, watch and listen to the local press to gain information and may be turned off by what they discover in the public record.
One of the finalist candidates for the city administrator position ripped up his job application and walked away. While I do not blame the man one bit for turning down a potential job here, I rest well at night knowing that my writings did not cause that decision, it was the dysfunctional group of politicians that run Augusta government that caused him to turn tail and run.
The motto of The Augusta Press is “all the news that’s fit to print (my emphasis),” so, yes, Mr. Williams, if you get into a fistfight with a tax paying citizen over your government’s inability to cut a stretch of grass on city owned land, we are going to report on it.
It is our duty.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
