The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Why do they pretend it’s all important?
Journalists delight in embarrassing elected officials, and sometimes elected officials make themselves look worse.
Considering it part of their job, journalists delight in embarrassing elected officials, and sometimes elected officials take it so poorly that they make themselves look worse.
That’s what happened the other day when CTNewsJunkie’s Christine Stuart took a photograph of the deputy speaker of the state House of Representatives, Jeffrey J. Berger, DWaterbury, showing him using his laptop computer to watch the HBO television program “Veep” in the Hall of the House during discussion of a bill about solar panels installed on farmland. Then Stuart put the photo on Twitter.
So later that day on the House floor Berger, resentful, tossed a plush toy rat at Stuart. It landed near her feet.
While the incident wasn’t quite as ominous as the fish delivery and severed horse head scenes from “The Godfather,” House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, apologized to Stuart and scolded Berger, who acknowledged he had done wrong. But state legislators have been embarrassed before by “gotcha” photos showing them disregarding legislative discussions, so the more important issue may be why they feel obliged to pretend that every discussion is worth their close attention.
Journalists themselves don’t feel that way. At the state Capitol they breezily come and go as they please according to what they feel is important or interesting, so inevitably they too miss some things that may deserve their attention. But most discussions in the legislative chambers and committee rooms are not important. Many are trivial, as much of what is said is just political posturing, special pleading, or even incoherent.
So in watching “Veep” rather than pretending to be fascinated by the pros and cons of solar panels on farms, Berger probably didn’t miss anything important. He was still ready to do his duty if the agenda became more compelling.
Many years ago a young newspaper reporter began to gain an appreciation of trivia in both government and journalism as he sat at the press table covering Town Council meetings in Vernon. To pass the time more pleasantly when discussion seemed inconsequential, he and a reporter for another newspaper would get out a piece of scrap paper and play dots and squares.
Meanwhile a third newspaper reporter at the meeting, a venerable woman who should have retired 20 years earlier but bravely soldiered on, slumped over and fell asleep on the table whenever the meeting lasted more than an hour. When she retired at last, the council adopted a resolution hailing her as the exemplar of journalism.
No one asked whether the resolution meant that journalism was better awake or asleep. Someone could have had fun playing “gotcha” there, but in the end it too would have been trivial. *** Look what else is missing: This week U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., undertook some political theater, traipsing around Washington purportedly in search of the Senate Republican leadership’s medical insurance legislation, which was not yet available. In fact Murphy was seeking only to agitate his political base in pursuit of campaign donations, which, citing his theatrics, he began soliciting the next day.
But Murphy just as well might have come home to traipse around the state Capitol in Hartford in search of a state budget proposal from his own party’s leadership in the General Assembly. There isn’t one of those either, and so Governor Malloy is figuring out how to run state government without a budget.
Maybe Connecticut’s Republican leaders can stage a search for a Democratic budget and do some fundraising off that.