Strange bedfellows
At first glance Donald Trump and the progressive leaders of the Massachusetts Legislature would seem to have little in common. Except when it comes to the prying eyes of the media trying to hold them accountable.
We’re all too familiar with Trump’s labeling anything that criticizes his actions as “fake news.” And his penchant for suing news organizations for defamation will only be encouraged by the ABC News decision to settle what many libel experts felt was an extremely winnable case involving his being found liable for sexual abuse.
As he prepares his return to the White House Trump has signaled business as usual — pushing a Fox Propaganda Channel lie that immigrants were behind the New Orleans terror attack when it was actually a military veteran born and raised in Texas.
And don’t forget his likely FBI Director, Kash Patel, has declared:
“We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Thankfully Massachusetts House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka don’t have the same tools — or to be fair, the same malign intent — when it comes to the media.
But they certainly aren’t shy about trying to shift the focus of the recently concluded two-year session away from their own internal warfare to what Mariano said were "naysayers who couldn't write enough about how incompetent we were and how incapable we were."
He declared the just-completed session was “incredibly productive by any reasonable, objective measure" and lamented that the "coverage of the past two years hasn't always reflected that."
But as the State House News Service noted, 20 percent of the two-year term's legislation was passed this Monday into early Tuesday morning, including two major health care reform bills.
"As a result, the perception of our work is often at odds with what we know to be the truth about what we've accomplished," Mariano complained, adding that "doing good work isn't enough if our constituents don't feel as though they can easily follow the process. It's our responsibility to ensure that voters feel that they have an efficient and transparent Legislature that is responsive to their concerns."
Ya think?
Spilka chose to encase her hammer inside a velvet glove:
“In an age when local news has been obliterated, state and local stories get bypassed in favor of national ones, and the major outlets we have here in Massachusetts choose to report more on personalities than policy, we can understand how frustrating it can be to try to get a handle on what is happening at the State House,” she said, according to her remarks as prepared for delivery.
The leadership laments conveniently overlook that fact that personalities did play a major role in lawmakers failing to complete their work by the July 31 deadline set by their own rules in 1995.
“It sort of tells me you’re not really serious about passing the bill to begin with,” Mariano said in July of the Senate’s handling of a measure that would have allowed supervised drug injection sites in an opioid overdose prevention measure.
Spilka chose to read back Mariano’s words a day later in speaking to reporters about a proposal to revise Boston’s property tax formula.
The tax proposal died in the Senate last month and supervised injection sites were missing from the last-minute approval of the opioid prevention bill.
Nor should we ignore the dysfunction of the Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, where the House and Senate chairs could not even agree on when to hold hearings.
The Boston Globe offered some potential insight into why. Following on the heels of a series of stories on how business is transacted behind closed doors on Beacon Hill.
Perhaps that may help explain Spilka’s lament that the Legislature’s “accomplishments are consistently overshadowed by a persistent negative media narrative.”
But the Ashland Democrat was spot on in noting:
“Our media landscape is fractured and distorted by algorithms designed to deliver profit to powerful companies. And so, to ensure that we are focusing on what’s vital while delivering news about the work we are doing, we must engage directly with those important to us — our constituents.”
Back in the day when the rules governing the length of legislative sessions were adopted, many of the state’s regional daily newspapers had reporters working in Statehouse Room 456. The Associated Press and United Press International supplemented their efforts with teams of reporters. But local news outlets have indeed been decimated, in Massachusetts and around the country.
Today, the single largest collection of journalists covering Beacon Hill are part of the Boston University Statehouse Program, which I direct. And which doesn’t meet in the summer when lawmakers engage in end-of-session marathons.
Both leaders offered comments — some generic, others vague — about changing the rules in how the branches interact. Something they have not been able to agree upon, by the way, since 2019.
The most likely change will be an end to the July 31 deadline in the second year of a two-year session. And lawmakers did keep their promise to finish all their business, even if it involved burning the post-midnight oil early on December 31, five months late.
The promises suggest they have heard, in part, the anger of voters who backed a ballot question offered by State Auditor Diana DiZoglio to audit the Legislature. And why they are likely leaving it to DiZoglio and her supporters to force a court ruling on what was likely an unconstitutional infringement by the executive branch on the legislative branch.
The next session will go a long way to either proving or disproving the complaints. The ”naysayers” and the public will be watching more intently than ever.