The Louisville Courier-Journal, Kentucky’s best and most widely-read paper, had a big scoop last week. Gov.-elect Ernie Fletcher (R), just two weeks after winning his election, assembled a transition team featuring members with close business ties. In fact, the Courier-Journal found apparent conflicts of interest — Fletcher has asked business executives and registered lobbyists serving on his transition team to study the very agencies that would affect their businesses.
In other words, two weeks after the election and months before even taking office, Fletcher, the first Republican elected as Kentucky’s governor in 32 years, is already kowtowing to the wealthy business interests that helped finance his campaign.
But as the Progress Report noted today, Fletcher has come up with a new strategy to show his displeasure with the state’s largest newspaper — the silent treatment.
Kentucky’s governor-elect has announced that he will refuse any and all questions from the Louisville Courier-Journal unless the newspaper submits inquiries in writing.
As the paper reported, “Fletcher spokesman Wes Irvin on Tuesday advised a Courier-Journal reporter of the new policy after the newspaper published a story reporting that some members of Fletcher’s transition team had conflicts or other business with agencies Fletcher has assigned them to study.”
The silly new policy is already making press conferences awkward. Last Thursday, for example, Fletcher held a press conference to announce some appointments to his gubernatorial administration. Fletcher twice refused questions from a Courier-Journal reporter, saying only, “You want to send those in writing; we’ll respond to them.”
Of course, the newspaper doesn’t intend to start covering the state’s governor via correspondence.
“We’re going to continue to ask questions at news conferences and at interviews,” Courier-Journal Executive Editor Bennie Ivory said. “We’re not going to change our procedures.”
From a journalistic perspective, this appears to be an absurd stunt that can’t last.
“If you’ve got the reporters who are asking the toughest questions, you’re just going to keep asking questions,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Jamieson also described Fletcher’s new rule for the paper “foolish.”
Foolish, silly, petty, embarrassing…so many adjectives come to mind.