Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

I hadn’t seen C. J. Karmargin’s Political Notebook column in the Arizona Daily Star for two weeks. Given how much has been going on in local politics, I found this really odd.

I asked around about this. Turns out that the Star thinks that a regular political column, even a regular political reporter, is a luxury that they can’t afford. Their hope is that their city council reporter can report on city politics, their county reporter can report on county politics. They will be moving Karmargin over to covering the legislature.

So, there is going to be no one covering day to day politics. Columns like Political Notebook (as well as Political Insider up in the Valley of the Yakes) can be useless at times; with their coverage of birthdays and baseball games they can amount to gossip columns about rather unglamorous people. However, having a political column still meant that they had a reporter like Karamargin who was keeping up with politics full time. If a political story broke, he knew who to call.

Covering politics is not the same as covering a governmental body. One has to wonder if someone who has been covering the city council will be able to be fair to challengers who plan to get the very people they have been making connections with out of office. A political reporter can be biased, but for the most part, they also love a good fight, and generally give adequate coverage to a challenger (not always fair, but at least they will know who they are).

The only upside of this is that the Star will have a full time reporter covering the legislature. They have been relying on Howard Fischer’s Capitol Media Service. Fischer is a good reporter, but since he was writing for a state wide audience, his pieces lacked any Southern Arizona perspective and often were free of any mention of Southern Arizona legislators. Karmargin will at least bring some “Baja” perspective to legislative reporting, which is a plus.

Sometimes, I found Karmargin to be a bit full of himself, but what reporter isn’t? Yeah, we bloggers are too. I remember a column published about the Wesley Clark campaign the day after we lost the primary. He just wrote about how the staff wouldn’t do an interview with him. We pointed out that had a room full of volunteers that he could talk to. Our policy was that reporters could talk to volunteers, but not to staff. This policy existed for two reasons: most of the paid staff was from out of state, and we wanted to highlight the vounteers. Karmargin’s column asking if we had something to hide. Maybe he was kidding, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. None the less, I will miss his coverage of politics.

The Star wouldn’t foot the bill to send him to the Democratic Convention, so he was left to call a few of us for our input on what was going on. I was one of the delegates that made it into his stories. Hopefully, he’ll be as nice to my brother as he was to me.

This whole thing also brings up another question. Why doesn’t either paper take local politics seriously enough that they think they need a reporter on it? Somehow, high school football gets coverage, but there was no reporter at the meeting last night that decided who will replace one of our State Senators. I worry that when big political stories come up, they will task some recent J-school grad who isn’t interested in local politics on it. I suppose that covering local elections so we can have an informed public takes too many column inches that would be better used for, I don’t know, the astrology column.

By the way, this leaves the Tucson Weekly’s Jim Nintzel as the only reporter left who is assigned to local politics. I only mention that because Nintzel is a regular reader. Actually, I heard that Karamargin is too.