After considerable confusion as to his whereabouts today, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl emerged at a late-afternoon press conference. He’d gone incommunicado the rest of the day, he told reporters, “just to kind of prove a point: that you all need to be more responsible.”

Ravenstahl railed about rumors that he had traipsed off to Mardi Gras, and confirmed what his press spokesperson had said previously: He’d been in the city all day.

I find this behavior so utterly baffling that I can’t decide what’s worse: the possibility that this is a weird excuse to cover for his absence, or the possibility that Ravenstahl is telling the truth. 

In either case, I’m going to stand by what I said before: It’s hard to square Ravenstahl’s seeming disappearance — whatever the cause — with the fact that his administration was asking city council to extend a declaration of emergency to fight the snow. If this is an emergency worthy of the name, now is not the time to pull a stunt designed to teach reporters a lesson. Especially a lesson about the need to be more responsible. 

But I will say this: If I were Luke Ravenstahl — and thank God I’m not — I too would suspect some members of the press of reckless behavior.  One reason is Virginia Montanez’s post about the mayor’s disappearance. 

Earlier today, Montanez posted that “From what the media and others are telling me, Lukey has gone AWOL.” She also tweeted that “Two separate sources from mainstream media tell me [Ravenstahl] wasn’t at [John Murtha’s] funeral.”

It’s no state secret who is, or isn’t, at John Murtha’s funeral. But if I’m the mayor, here’s what that looks like: You’ve got a blogger passing along rumors that purportedly come from the mainstream press — but you can’t be sure who in the press is spreading this stuff. So when reporters demand answers and accountability from you, you have no way of knowing how accountable they are for spreading the rumors you’re answering questions about. And bear in mind: If I were the mayor, I might be just a little over-sensitive about the press to begin with.

But put aside speculation about Ravenstahl’s motivations. If I’m a reporter tempted to share stuff with Montanez, I’ve got to ask myself: Is this really smart? Why am I running the risk of scooping myself on a breaking story by helping it to appear online?

Reporters are incurable gossips, of course: That’s part of why they get into the business. And maybe it’s not much of a leap from relying on an anonymous source — something almost all of us do from time to time — to becoming an anonymous source for someone else. But reporters ought to know better than anyone that, each time you invoke the old “sources say …” formulation, you’re testing the reader’s faith. If the reporters start becoming such sources — especially on a breaking, sensitive story — don’t they risk testing the faith of the public officials they talk to every day?

I don’t claim to have the answer to that question. But it’s one reporters other than me might want to ask. 

I mean, there’s a weird phenomenon going on here, especially where Montanez is considered. More than a year ago, I noted that local media outlets were willing to bend all kinds of rules for her. Back then, of course, Montanez was anonymous, blogging under the name “PittGirl.” And reporters indulged that to a surprising extent:

I can’t think of too many cases in which the Post-Gazette has done a 600-word Q&A — plus prominent mention in multiple follow-up pieces — with someone whose identity it refused to disclose. And it’s not because nobody over there knows who she is. I know of at least one reasonably high-ranking Post-Gazette editor who has met PittGirl for lunch.

In fact, this may be PittGirl’s most impressive accomplishment: Her popularity was such that she got some of the city’s most prominent media outlets to play by the blogosphere’s rules.

And so it seems to be. Now it’s reporters who are being accorded anonymity by the blogger. Just yesterday I wrote that while local blogs seem to be drying up a bit lately, that may be partly because “the bloggers have ‘won’ — in the sense of gaining more say inside power structures they sought to change.”

Is that a problem? Maybe not. For right now, it seems like no one — except possibly some local officials — seems to mind.

And it’s not like this is the first time questions have circulated about the mayor’s whereabouts. It’s also not the first time the mayor has acted like it’s a damn imposition for reporters to ask him questions that any fool would ask. It’s sometimes as if he thinks reporters are like the stereotypical immature, reckless blogger. If a couple reporters have started acting like it, how much right does he have to complain?  

This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2010.

E-mail Chris Potter about this post.

8 replies on “I just don’t know who to trust anymore”

  2. It’s pretty simple really. Once a rumor is out there, the MSM can then comment on the rumor. That way it’s not them making rumors public — it’s them *reporting* on rumors in the public.

    A prime example of this is the Ravenstahl handcuff story. Apparently the MSM had heard rumblings but nothing was published until John McIntire blogged on it which gave them all permission to report on what McIntire had posted.

  3. Maria —

    That’s a well established trend at the national level, and in recent political history dates back before blogs, to tabloids like the Enquirer. Then the press does the “o, those darn tabloid rumors!” stories, which allow them to condemn the story at the same time they discuss it.

    The dynamic here seems different, though. For one thing, it’s pretty clear that, unlike the McIntire situation, reporters WERE trying to chase down Ravenstahl’s whereabouts. I mean, it’s not like this was some story that had been lying around for a long time, like an old arrest or some John Edwards affair — it was a breaking story yesterday. What makes this weird is that, apparently, some reporters were going straight to a blog even as they (or their colleagues) were trying to land the story themselves.

    It’s great for Thatschurch, and it may even be a good thing for Pittsburgh, I don’t know. But it’s a role I’m surprised to see my better-paid brethren playing.

  4. The City is in a strange situation. On the one hand, of the people I would describe as the (perhaps self-appointed) *intelligentsia*, very few have much respect for the Mayor. But the Mayor seem to have a lock on the *Party* mechanism, and because the *Party* has a lock on the general vote, the Mayor can almost do nothing to get himself voted out of office (I feel like I am talking about an Eastern European country).

    Anyway, the practical upshot is the Mayor is virtually immune to criticism, although he almost always reacts to it. Often he reacts dramatically, as in the “War on Snow” of two years ago. Sometimes he reacts hostilely, as in his reactions to Steeler’s-Halloween-gate, Tiger-gate, Mario-golf-gate and SUV-gate (thank goodness he wasn’t involved in Henry Louis-Gate(s))(thank you, Daily Show).

    For this event, the Mayor’s reactions have been varied. After being absent on the fifth and I believe the sixth, the Mayor was very engaged on the seventh, eighth and ninth, even if the City’s plows/salt trucks were not. I will say that members of Council have also been very engaged all the way through. Living in the East End and reading about Carson street, I really wonder if the Mayor instructed Public Works to ignore the neighborhoods of his political adversaries. But I guess the whole of the City was bad.

    Things really changed as far as I am concerned on Wednesday the tenth and after, as the plowing suddenly picked up and salt was laid down to break up the packed snow and ice on the roads (in the fact of another approaching storm). Since then the City has been barely adequate in salting and plowing (compared to their previous non-functional state), and the Mayor has still been working hard. Until yesterday. Then the Mayor did what he did.

    Was he planning on making a run to the airport? If so, why not sign the emergency order early in the day and then take off? Was he really trying to teach reporters a lesson? Could he really be that passive-aggressive? Doesn’t he realize what kind of message that sends to the voters? Does he think he is really that immune?

    Two Political Junkies had a link to a story from Philadelphia. Apparently Michael Nutter has really performed in this crisis. No absences, lots of public appearances, setting an example for City workers. Although I guess the plowing record was mixed at best, Nutter avoided saying anything stupid (like claiming that streets that were still snow covered were in fact clear). Combined with the post from Bob Mayo’s blog giving us the uninspiring responses the Public Works director gave him about the status of the “War on Snow”, an ugly picture of the top leadership of our City’s government emerges. Not surprisingly, that picture comes from the blogs.

  5. While I agree the mayor’s reaction made no sense, I generally don’t like the media making a public official jump through hoops because they can. My questions are: was he really out of contact that long that it required media attention? Also, was his signature on the emergency extension really that important or was Peduto just taking a shot at Ravenstal?

  6. @DrunkMonk — Those are good questions, and are being hotly debated. Certainly the mayor’s supporters are suggesting that Peduto was trying to gin up an issue to make political hay out of this. And on its face, it’s hard to imagine a sillier argument than who is going to sign off on a request that everybody knows the mayor wants, and that council will give him.

    That said … had the mayor been more accessible, the matter could have been cleared up very easily. And you’d think that, especially after the debacle of last weekend, the mayor would be at pains to make himself available if a question like this came up. (Clearly reporters knew where to find him when he was jumping into humvees and manning the phones at the 3-1-1 center.)

    As for the media: I think one factor here is that this ain’t the first time reporters have been left to puzzle over the mayor’s whereabouts. Sometimes, the mayor has gotten a pass on those questions. For example, at a protest last summer at the mayor’s office, reporters asked where the mayor was — a natural question given the circumstances. His chief of staff told us he didn’t know — and this was after the protest had gone on for much of the morning. I don’t think anyone started hounding the mayor on that occasion. On the other end of the scale is his unannounced trip to New York City on a jet owned by Ron Burkle, which generated considerable headlines — and which the mayor himself later acknowledged was a mistake.

    I can’t speak for other reporters, of course. But had this been a one-time deal … had it not been part of an ongoing (if low-intensity) emergency … and had the mayor not been out of town when the storm first struck … it probably wouldn’t have been such a big deal.

  7. I think Maria has it dead on — that allowing an issue to spread to blogs enables the MSM to report on “rumors” — but I’ll take it even a step further. As you know sometimes the blogs are seen as a lever to pull. If some reporters felt convinced there was a bigger story there, but not optimistic about their chances of breaking through the administration’s stonewalling, they might spread it to the blogs just to “shake things up”. Maybe if the administration reads a couple hundred witheringly sarcastic comments on PittGirl, the thinking goes, it’ll have to address this. Whether they do this to get down to a better layer of a story, or to get back at an administration they feel doesn’t respect or deal fairly with them, is an open and uninteresting question to me…

    One of the reasons I don’t get as excited as you about these issues Chris is because I never viewed MSM reporters, bloggers, political players and news consumers as different species. We’re all just trying to have an impact, and any pretensions to the contrary are just those.

  8. @ Bram — in any case, it’s certainly true that new technologies are blurring the lines between those categories.

    Speaking of all this, WTAE’s Bob Mayo takes up this question at his blog:

    http://thebusmansholiday.blogspot.com/2010/02/reporting-in-burghosphere-2010.html

    Bob’s take is that reporters are often asked questions by their readers/viewers/listeners, and Mayo treats queries from bloggers the same way he does from anybody else. That makes sense, especially in the context Mayo discusses: He was at the Murtha funeral and, as I suggested in my original post, there was no state secret about who was and wasn’t attending. (It was really the FIRST item — about reporters “telling me [that] Lukey has gone AWOL” — that struck me as odd.)

    But it’s quite possible I’m behind the curve in that a) I’m a late adopter when it comes to Twitter, and b) as someone who works for a publication that comes out once a week, I still tend to put an extra premium on not tipping my hand, the blog notwithstanding.

    Anyway, thanks all for the discussion.

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