Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

As reported earlier on this here blog, C. J. Karamargin is leaving the Arizona Daily Star and moving to the Tucson Citizen. He will not be covering politics for them, but will be doing “features.” Ironically, Karamargin started at the Citizen as a features writer, but left when there was an exodous from that paper in 2000 and 2001. Karamargin now seems to be part of an exodous from the Star, with reporters like Mitch Tobin also gone.

I wasn’t always happy with Karamargin’s reporting. After a while, I started wondering how much of the lack of political coverage in our morning daily was him, and how much of it was shortsighted editors. In general, our local media likes to pretend they live in a world where politics simply doesn’t exist.

For example, the State of the State address, where the Governor announced new immigration policy and her budget, didn’t merit front page coverage. That can’t be blamed on Karamargin, that’s an editorial decision. It tells you an awful lot about how important the Star’s editors regard stories about politics and public policy.

The story that made the front page that day was yet another story about the then ongoing search for a new University of Arizona president. The story took up even more room since it included pictures and capsule biographies of the various candidates. The pictures and fully fleshed biographies could also be found elsewhere in the paper, which means that rather than giving the State of the State story prominence, they chose to be redundant.

Karamargin’s last few weeks at the paper had him ensconsed in Phoenix covering the legislature. This wouldn’t have been much of a problem, except that he was supposed to be covering local politics too. The biggest political story this year has to be the CD 8 race. Hard to cover that one from Phoenix.

What folks at the papers will tell you is that political stories don’t sell papers. That may very well be true, but given the erosion in newspaper readership, I don’t think it can be argued that whatever it is they are trying to do is selling papers either. As old fashioned as it is to talk about a company’s responsibility to a community, a city’s daily newspaper should see it as its job to cover local politics, no matter how boring they think it is. What could be more important than informing citizens how their taxes are being spent and what is being done by public officials in their name?

Interestingly, the Citizen has been getting better lately. Their coverage of border issues has been excellent (the Star’s border reporter recently quit too), and they have had a few shining moments. For example, they actually sent a reporter to Chapel Hill to find out a little background about the newly selected U of A president. The Citizen, with a smaller staff and not as much money thought this was important, and the Star didn’t think that this was all that important.

We are lucky to have two papers, our big brother up the road only has one daily. I would think that two papers would lead to reporters scrambling to one-up each other, but somehow it hasn’t. The Star, being the biggest paper in Southern Arizona and our state’s first daily, should own certain issues, like the border. Instead, they seem to be satisfied with covering nothing of any sort of importance.