Watching the media coverage over the misdemeanor arrest and guilty plea of Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) is a good case study in the tight line reporters walk sometimes in trying to get a story out both quickly and correctly.
Craig was arrested at the Minneapolis airport for soliciting an undercover officer for sex in a bathroom.
The incident happened in June, but it wasn’t reported until three months later, well after a misdemeanor guilty plea was entered.
Local Idaho reporters defended themselves by saying that misdemeanors can slip under the radar, especially when they occur in another state halfway across the country.
That didn’t stop certain segments of the public, particularly those Idahoans who happen to be “D’s,” to charge that the conservative Senator almost got away with one.
Many editors were already debating the value of publishing and broadcasting other allegations of gay conduct from the Senator from 2006, when an Internet blogger started writing about claims of other sexual offers from Craig’s past in Washington DC restrooms.
In a defiant press conference Craig blamed a lot of his troubles on the Idaho Statesman, the newspaper based in Boise.
Caught between Craig’s claims of overzealous coverage on one side and the public’s concerns of a cover-up on the other, the editorial staff fought back, saying in part:
“Sen. Larry Craig apologized for bringing ‘a cloud over Idaho.’ We're sorry, senator.
This cloud does not belong to the people who have elected you for the past 27 years. It's all yours.”
The morning news team of Chris and Jeff on CBS 13 went so far as to sit in chairs next to each other and “recreate” the foot taps and hand gestures between stalls listed in the police report as indicative of solicitation.
All of this, from the sublime to the ridiculous, indicates the difficulty in walking the tight line of covering personal conduct largely unrelated to job performance.
Or is living a secret life tantamount to lying to the voters, as sure an indicator as there is about what kind of public servant someone really makes?