Seeking new business plan

Gov. Sarah Sanders explained the other day that the media used a failed business plan in asking her about a lawsuit accusing her of unlawful secrecy in her stonewalled response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Her point was that media organi- zations would make more money if they would not inconvenience her.

She said that all businesses in the state except media are doing great thanks to her.

Did she really take that credit? Let us examine her quoted comment after a reporter dared to ask her to respond to that lawsuit while she was focused on taking personal credit for a defense-project expansion in East Camden, the groundwork on which preceded her administration.

She said, “All of the business in this state, under my leadership, seems to be doing pretty well except for the media. So you guys may want to look at a different business plan.”

Thank goodness she has been in office the last several months to catapult Walmart and Stephens and the defense industry and the Helena-West Helena water system and the rice and soybean crops—everything but this column, just about.

Surely the fence-building sector knows that I would not have had the backyard fence replaced were Sanders not governor. Absent her leadership, I would have let the beagles run toward traffic.

An insignificant blogger who filed a lawsuit alleging her office was out of compliance with the Freedom of Information Act by withholding information he requested is unworthy of a royal response. The queen was busy taking credit for a defense-industry expansion by the federal government that she otherwise vows to keep out of Arkansas because it is no damned good.

Please note that I did not call her Queen Sarah. Name-calling is a bad business plan, never mind the many reader requests that I resume calling her that.

Well, dozens. That counts as a lot in an industry with a bad business plan.

The blogger in question is so insignificant that Sanders called a special legislative session in his honor—to make secret retroactively much of what taxpayers spend on her and her family. The blogger—called the Blue Hog—was pestering her with formal information requests that were beneath her.

So she had the Legislature go all ex post facto on him.

Being historically naïve and of chronically modest means, I have worked more than a half-century in the media on the misguided premise that the business model had to do with the delivery system and revenue-generation from circulation and advertising, all in global and unavoidable decline in the digital age.

I thought our newspaper in Arkansas was doing better than most, even with an occasional news article, and a frequent column, that the governor found to be a poor business practice on account of her not liking it.

I thought the business side left the newsgathering to the constitutional principle of serving the guaranteed liberty of a free press and the public’s right to know.

After all, this newspaper lifted its paywall during the pandemic to serve the public health interest. On the same day the governor explained the failed business model, the little Madison County Record lifted its paywall so everyone could see its story on maneuvering regarding the Buffalo National River.

But now, the self-celebrating grand poobah of thriving Arkansas business says in effect that reporters should become her stenographers if they want their publishers to stop hemorrhaging.

The governor no doubt knows good business plans. She has an association with a couple of close friends who have a political consulting firm in Virginia that got $19,000 out of Arkansas for a lectern that those friends do not make or normally sell, and that no one in Arkansas has seen. Now that is a business plan. Quickly, somebody at the newspaper needs to start selling the governor nonessential and never-seen furniture at comically high prices.

Those friends of hers later showed up at the Paris Air Show where Sarah brought home the deal for the East Camden defense expansion that had been worked on mostly by the Asa Hutchinson administration—and from which she did not want her attention, or anyone else’s, diverted by nagging questions raised by creepy bloggers sitting around in their under-britches while she saved Arkansas business.

By the way, the state’s unemployment rate has crept up from 2.6 in June to 2.9 in September, all, no doubt, in the media sector, which, not coincidentally, began about June raising questions the governor did not like.

So, let the word go out from Arkansas to all troubled media organizations: Lay off the royals and laugh all the way to the bank.