July 3, 2005

The Missing Piece

Larry Daughtrey has a good column today on how the Tennessee media is covering the legislature less. Daughtrey: "It just sticks in my competitive craw to see the FBI, not the press, break the biggest Capitol Hill story of the decade."

The only media development Daughtrey misses is the growing impact on legislative media coverage of independent "citizen journalists," who publish blogs and online news magazines.

This year alone, Tennessee political news blogs and online magazines like this one have broken two significant stories. The first story involved a bill designed to make it easier for county commissions to raise wheel taxes while stripping the right of Tennesseans to force such tax increases to referendum via a petition drive. Citizens' media coverage of that legislation exposed the real intent of the legislation, showed how the lobbyist for the Tennessee County Mayors Association mislead legislators about what the bill did, and led to the key bill sponsors dropping their support for the legislation dropping their support. Tennessee's capitol hill press corps eventually covered the story - but not for a full week after the online indepdendent scribes had it first.

The second story involved House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh's breaking of House rules in order to send a bill he didn't like back to a committee from which it had already been passed. Once again, the online independent media owned the story - the mainstream media coverage was late, incomplete and often just plain got the facts wrong.