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Belloc
Here richly, with
ridiculous display,
The Politician's corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged – Hilaire Belloc
A news item written by Dean Pagani in The Laurel tells us the Hartford Courant will no longer be
endorsing candidates for office at the state level. “It would be better,”
Pagani writes, “if the Courant and Tribune [the paper’s owner] just told the
truth. Our [Courant] staff has been cut dramatically, no one reads the
editorial page, so we are focusing on the news we can best deliver.”
Well sure, honesty is always the best policy, but Pagani has
said far too little. The Courant, the ownership of which has shifted hands over
the years, has been outflanked by other news conglomerates. Courant reporters
have either retired or drifted off to greener pastures. The conglomeratization
of news is a serious problem. Big, in the news business, is not always better;
it is simply more remunerative. Large news organization can increase profits by
cutting staff and relying on resources outside Connecticut for its news filler.
Connecticut, it may be argued, is a small state, and it
needs small and aggressive media outlets. Every time a reporter leaves a local
media, we lose memory and brainpower. Blowing up the editorial department at
the Courant may not have the effect indented by the paper’s overlords. On a
state level, opinionizing will simply leech into the news pages. This already
has happened across the nation, a decades old de-evolutionary process.
Civil War journalism, we all know, was little more than
partisan reporting. There were, at the time, both Democrat and Republican newspapers.
In the post-modern period, we appear to have reprised the post-Civil War media
model.
To the extent that Connecticut news organizations do not
strike an attitude of opposition to the reigning power – the Democrat Party in
Connecticut, especially in its blighted urban sectors – it will be enticingly
absorbed by the reigning power. Over time, a pragmatic, business policy of non-resistant
to a single party hegemonic state makes
news outlets little more than party propaganda instruments, and papers wholly
owned subsidiaries of the power of force.
Part of this writer’s onerous duties is to watch carefully
for signs of true media independence but, sadly, he cannot recall many recent
editorials critical of any notable Democrat politician of long standing in
Connecticut, unless, to vary an abandoned phrase no longer in use, the beloved
politician has been “caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”
Even then, given a supportive media, there are paths around such
inconvenient setbacks. The news cycle is short, life is long and, for some
favored politicians in Connecticut, public service ends at the grave, provided
the undying politician is a much pampered progressive. Senator Martin Looney, the President Pro Tem of the state Senate has been in
public office more than 40 years. U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, for two decades Connecticut’s Consumer Protection
Attorney General – look for pictures of him daily in your daily newspaper -- has
been in public office for 45 years.
Here is one glaring example of a big city politician in
Connecticut who has survived a recent political tempest. The Mayor of
Bridgeport Connecticut is Joe Ganim. Upon his return from a
stretch in prison, he was re-elected Mayor. Still in the grip of Democrat Party
machinery, Bridgeport is odd that way. Ganim had been convicted of sixteen
counts of corruption related activity, for which he spent seven years of a nine
year sentence under lock and key. Having been re-elected Mayor, he then decided
to run for Governor of Connecticut, and this writer decided to poke him in the
ribs. So, he wrote about Ganim in 2017:
No one knows exactly
why the good people of Bridgeport elected Mr. Ganim to represent their city as
its mayor so soon after his release from prison. The shadow of the prison was
yet upon him when he defeated petitioning candidate Mary Jane Foster by a two to
one margin, having previously disposed of incumbent Democratic Mayor Bill Finch
in a hotly contested primary. Prior to his incarceration, Mr. Ganim had been a
successful mayor. Somewhere along the way Mr. Finch lost the backing of
Bridgeport kingmaker Mario Testa, an indispensable political shaker and mover
in Bridgeport. Terry Cowgill, writing in CTNewsJunkie, attributes Mr. Ganim’s short journey from
prison to the mayor’s office to the “hypermasculine… testicular fortitude” of
Mr. Ganim, but Mr. Ganim’s overweening ambition does not quite explain why
Bridgeporters favored his bid for mayor; perhaps they figured … better the
crook you know. Then too, Ganim was not a Republican crook. Democratic crooks
have nine lives, Republican crooks [as the twice convicted aborted career of
former Governor John Rowland has shown] have at best two. Blueness in
Connecticut’s major cities has its privileges.
The column, refreshingly contrarian, likely was not printed.
For as long as this writer has been posting in
Connecticut Commentary – the oldest political blog of its kind in the
state – he has been sending the postings, columns really, to nearly all news
editorial pages in Connecticut save the
Hartford Courant, more than twenty publications. Publication of his columns
during the Malloy and Lamont administrations have been, to put the matter
politely, sketchy.
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