Call a newsroom, any newsroom, at 4:45 pm on any Friday afternoon. A lot of the reporters have already left and the ones remaining are furiously trying to finish a project so they can bolt out the door.
With this in mind, it’s the perfect time to release bad news that you don’t want anyone to know about. Broadcast journalists already have their evening news lineup finished and print reporters are already heading home. Even if you can find someone to write about a story for Saturday’s papers, studies have shown that the Saturday paper is the least-read paper of the week.
No one has ever mastered the art of the Friday-afternoon news dump better than the Bush White House. For Karl Rove & Co., it’s an art form.
As Judy Keen and Haya El Nasser explained in a great article in yesterday’s USA Today, the Bush administration “seems to be following an axiom that guided many of its predecessors: To keep negative headlines to a minimum, release bad news on a Friday.”
This Friday will be no exception.
As the USAT article explained, every year for at least the last 15 years, the Census Bureau has released annual reports on U.S. poverty statistics in September. And every year, the report has been released to the public on a Tuesday or a Thursday.
This year, when the Census data will probably show that poverty has increased in America, guess which day the administration has picked to release the data.
Census spokesman Lawrence Neal says the agency “picked a date out of the air.” September 26. Yeah, that’s a nice round number. And I’m sure that it’s an amazing coincidence that it’s the day before Rosh Hashanah.
Keen and El Nasser included several good examples to document the trend.
* On a Friday last November, the Environmental Protection Administration said it would relax enforcement of the Clean Air Act so older coal-fired power plants could renovate without having to install anti-pollution equipment.
* On a Friday in January, the administration said it would consider removing Clean Water Act protections from up to one-fifth of the nation’s streams, ponds, lakes, mudflats and wetlands.
* The resignations of Army Secretary Thomas White and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill were announced on Fridays.