Summary: "State leaders used to invite coverage of their activity. Now the Legislature is making reporting more difficult than ever." / Willow Park Civics is providing a blog of articles and research on specific legislative topics, during the 88th Texas Legislative Session.
Latest Update: Wednesday, 11 January, 2023
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Where Did All the Press-Friendly Texas Politicians Go?
Where Did All the Press-Friendly Texas Politicians Go?, The Texas Monthly, 11 January 2023, (in .pdf), Excerpts.
State leaders used to invite coverage of their activity. Now the Legislature is making reporting more difficult than ever.
So long, Senate floor. For as long as anybody can remember, credentialed members of the Texas press corps have sat at a long rectangular table at the front left of the upper chamber, free to observe proceedings, talk shop, and occasionally grab interviews with lawmakers and staffers. This was an unusual privilege: many state legislatures don’t allow press on the floor, and of course Congress doesn’t. In one small way, the Texas Lege, a pretty opaque and parochial institution, was a little more transparent than its counterparts.
On Friday, the Secretary of the Senate [indicated]: the press would not be allowed on the floor. Reporters could sit in the gallery with everyone else.
Babysitting the press table in the Senate, in particular, has always been seen as less preferable to the equivalent duty in the House, which is more rambunctious and where lawmakers actually like to chat. The interesting discussions in the Senate these days mainly happen behind closed doors.
But the closing of the Senate floor does have significance as another installment in a long process by which Texas politicians—overwhelmingly Republican ones, with a few Democrats in the mix—have withdrawn from engagement with the media.
Patrick is merely continuing a decades-long trend of Texas public officials pulling back from the press. There is a level of paranoia and mistrust and sometimes hatred of reporters in Texas that is continually surprising. In the mid-2010s, I was told by some state agency employees that their elected boss kept a white-noise machine in his office to foil potential listening devices left, perhaps, by reporters. Around the same time, a lobbyist told me, another had visitors to his office sign forms indicating they were not closeted journalists, nor were they acting on behalf of any. For portions of the last eight years, representatives in Governor Greg Abbott’s office would not even speak to the Texas Tribune, the publication that does the most comprehensive coverage of state government.
Conservatives like to say the media brought this on themselves—that reporters are too left-wing and have forfeited their relevance and audience and claim to authority. But there are so many reasons why the reporting relationship at the Legislature has changed since the time of the great Paul Burka, longtime chronicler of the institution for this magazine. Burka was one of the greatest political writers the state—maybe the country—ever produced. But the way he did his work can’t be done today.
Burka was in the club, which is partly why he could speak so authoritatively and collect so much insider gossip. He came from the same social circle as many lawmakers.
Today journalists have changed, and so have lawmakers. The gulfs between the racial, class, and educational backgrounds of journalists and the officials they cover are wider than they used to be. The good-old-boy ethos that runs the state is still strong, and some lawmakers and journalists do socialize, but the relationship is vastly different than it used to be. With that goes opportunities to build trust. Meanwhile, politicians now operate in a world that is media-saturated. They’re always “on,” and always on guard. On social media, they have the opportunity to present exactly the versions of themselves they want to project.
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