Media not taking well Landry's devaluing them

Poor Tyler Bridges, he’s not one of the cool kids anymore and he doesn’t like it. Assuredly, he’s not the only one in Louisiana’s legacy print media.

Bridges, a longtime reporter now working for The Advocate newspaper chain, recently gave readers an idea of how upset he was with Republican Gov. Jeff Landry. For anybody who reads his stuff, if not generally his outlet, or any of (what’s left of) the Gannett outlets in the state, or the only major daily outside of these two combines the Lake Charles American Press, it becomes clear they aren’t fans of the governor.

That their ideological leanings differ from his was something Landry recognized long ago, and as have many conservative politicians around the country he built campaigns and governance around direct communication with people rather than try to cajole a hostile intermediary into saying nice things about him. Indeed, part of this strategy has been to marginalize that conduit of indirect communication.

That’s evident from some whining that appeared in a recent Bridges Advocate article about Landry’s recently-created Fiscal Responsibility Program, a panel of his hand-picked administrator Steve Orlando plus legislators, four GOP senators and three Republican representatives plus a Democrat from that chamber. It will strive to monitor state spending and ensure government operates in the most efficient and effective manner, with a report due at year’s end.

Insofar as the subject of the piece, it raises a relevant point. The panel has met twice to review contractors to perform the work, but apparently without issuing notice requirements, behind closed doors, and failing to keep minutes, which are requirements of open meetings laws which may apply to the get-togethers.

Possibly these may fall under an exception. The panel meets the definition of a public body as it operates to dispense public policy advice, and it’s possible that it could consider its actions surrounding contract discussion as an exception under R.S. 42:17(A)(1) as defined in R.S. 39:1594(C)(2)(c) (actually misidentified in the previous as “1593”). But that would require a vote in the open then to discuss in executive session.

There’s unlikely anything nefarious going on here as an explanation for deliberate murkiness, although Bridges tries to sneak in a hint that the job could get grooved to a firm with a former state employee as a principal. Still, that would become publicly known when entered into the Louisiana Checkbook system, so there would be no reason for subterfuge. Likely the nine involved were unaware that a body, even if not created under statute, for that purpose did qualify as a public body subject to the law.

So far, informative enough. Then Bridges starts the whining:

It’s another example of Landry acting less transparently than his predecessor, [Democrat] Gov. John Bel Edwards.

Edwards regularly advised the media on his public appearances, while Landry only occasionally does so.

Edwards provided a schedule of his past activities when it was requested, while the schedule that Landry turns over is full of holes.

Edwards also regularly informed the public when he would travel out of state and abroad, while Landry has kept that information private.

Striking, of course, is the sense of entitlement and arrogance that Bridges conveys – that he is (and perhaps the rest of the media are) so crucially essential to the public weal that it’s an affront, if not disaster to the polity, that he doesn’t know where Landry is every minute of every day – topped by the fact that nothing requires Landry under the law to reveal this. How critical to the republic is it that a bunch of scribblers, much less the public, know to where Landry is wandering off at any given time?

I would guess that Landry himself would get a good guffaw over the distress he has visited onto Bridges by violating Bridges’ feelings of privilege. And note as well the intellectual laziness afflicting Bridge’s portmanteau of the panel’s behavior onto allegations that Landry tries to hide stuff: Landry’s not the one who apparently violated open meetings law, it was his appointee and eight legislators.

But the real howler of it all, and incontrovertible evidence that Bridges cannot help but report to the world through his ideological lenses, is the flight from reality in claiming Edwards was more of a paragon of transparency than Landry. In fact, in several major instances Edwards did all he could either to keep things under wraps to avoid scrutiny of politically unfavorable incidents, if not deliberately mislead both policy-makers and the public.

This is the same Edwards who hired a problematic political ally then tried to keep under wraps the scandal that ensued, eventually costing the state at least $85,000. It’s the same Edwards who confected a deal to benefit a big state party supporter and donor for no-bid state contracts. And the one who gave an ally free state housing that came to light only after the beneficiary resigned amid a raft of questionable ethical behavior. And, most disgustingly, the same Edwards who, to buttress his reelection attempt, did nothing to prevent a coverup over the death of motorist Ronald Greene and actually aided it by misleading policy-makers in private and the public over the airwaves.

Of course, Bridges agreed with Edwards’ agenda but, perhaps more importantly, was in the clubhouse with him, as well as having sympathetic access to legislative elites and other figures of political power outside of state government. That goes to your head rather thoroughly

All gone when Landry came to power and more principled conservatives took the legislative reins. Now, following an increasingly common pattern among conservative officeholders who have learned the legacy media by and large, as well as some alternative media spinoffs, never will cover you without hostility until you kowtow to their agenda, Bridges and others are merely tolerated, if not ignored. And with the technological changes wrought to political communication, not only can you argue with somebody who buys ink by the barrel, you can dismiss them as irrelevant.

That’s what really gets them, being made to feel they are unimportant, thus the overwrought, under-evidenced temper tantrum in print. They need to get over it; they’ll sleep better at night.