When I was covering city government for the Anchorage Daily News, I always thought that the intense interview style of my colleague Steve Rinehart was overly confrontational. But last spring, after I was elected to the Municipal Assembly and came under his attack, I realized that his style was exactly right. It was one of many discoveries as a politician I wish I'd made while I was still a reporter.

I was first subjected to Rinehart's questioning when the assembly was considering an ordinance to impose a six-month jail term on hitchhikers. I thought my decision would be easy: I opposed any restriction on hitchhiking as an infringement on civil liberties.

But as the weeks passed and the time for the vote approached, the decision became more difficult. My district is the city's most crime-ridden, and the police said this law would help close down a drug and hooker market that had started in its heart. Moreover, the sponsor of the ordinance was eager to help me out with my legislation if I could help him with his. And no constituents contacted me saying they opposed the ordinance.

Then Rinehart called me into the stealth hut, a tiny interview room off the Daily News's newsroom named because of its use in office politics. His eyes bulging and his voice raised in apparent incredulity, Rinehart spewed questions at me in rapid fire. He looked like a terrier straining to break free and bite me. Like other interview subjects who had gotten the Rinehart treatment, I stumbled and spluttered, admitted more than I intended, and let my position look as foolish as it actually was.

Besides his intensity, Rinehart had another weapon: he knew a lot more about the issue than I did. A humiliating confirmation of that fact came a couple of days later. With the assembly poised to approve a watered-down hitchhiking law, the Daily News pointed out that an identical law was already on the books.

Since resigning from daily newspaper reporting and becoming first a political consultant, then a congressional campaign press secretary, and finally a successful small-time politician, I've found that neither side in the struggle between reporters and politicians really understands the other's weakness. Among my discoveries:

* Elected politicians at all levels are expected to make decisions on many more issues than they can possibly study in depth: even if a reporter spends only one day on an issue. he or she has more objective information than most of the officials voting on it. Some of my assembly colleagues don't even read the legislation they vote on. (At least I try.)

* Reporters generally are not skeptical enough of politicians' motivations. Public policy considerations rarely enter into the decisions of most politicians. and the truth is told only when it is convenient.

* Politicians generally have no more notion of journalists" black-and-white perception of public policy than reporters do of the swarm of gray in which most politicians exist. That's why politicians so often suspect reporters of having political motives.

* Journalists, divorced from the gritty concerns of commerce and power, are ill-served by their culture of innocence. As a reporter, near the end of my time at the News, I covered a meeting of the state power authority, then in the midst of a procurement scandal. The reporters were ordered out of the room so that the authority board and staff could get their stories straight in executive session. Sitting in the lobby with my journalistic colleagues, I heard some of the reporters discussing how hard it was to believe that the men on the authority board had done anything wrong -- their statements sounded so public-spirited.

Later, as a consultant attending private meetings with various clients, I often thought of the juicy stories those gullible reporters could write if only they could hear what I was hearing behind closed doors.

Sometimes it seems journalists are the only people who take seriously the pretexts that politicians concoct to explain what they do. As a journalists I carefully quoted such statements in the morning paper. When I moved to the other side, I found that such statements were made -- as cover -- only after the media became involved.

Another difference between the two cultures is that, while reporters often have deeper knowledge of the policy issues behind decisions, politicians tend to have broader sources of information.

Local government reporters, at least in a city the size of Anchorage, often don't know that neighborhood controversies are bubbling up until they explode. Community politics works mostly by word of mouth in neighborhood meetings and phone calls. Local government reporters generally are young, transient people: they tend to hang out with other journalists. Some seem to think that not belonging to the community is a sign of ethical objectivity.

For their part, news organizations seldom cover the community council and board and commission meetings where issues develop. By the time those issues get to the level of being formally decided by elected representatives, they are months old. As a result, the public doesn't learn the real story of how a given decision was arrived at.

Reporters also tend to undervalue information about "boring" issues that privately motivate much of what politicians do. In Anchorage, assembly meetings begin with bid awards for construction jobs and the like. Most of the press corps rolls in an hour late, missing a lot of what's really going on.

One of the biggest battles in my first months was over a contract to build a new police training center. The carpenters union, which has a generous political action committee, didn't have an agreement with the low bidder, although other unions did. The carpenters launched an aggressive campaign to persuade the assembly to reject the contract on the ground that the low bidder hadn't met minority contracting requirements. They won; then the issue was reconsidered but died in a parliamentary gambit, and finally was reintroduced and passed with one changed vote.

In the meantime, the conflict had spread into issues as diverse as police protection, assembly pay, and lowincome housing. But none of this made it into print or onto the evening news, and city hall reporters I talked to didn't even know what was going on.

Reporters who focus only on what is colorful and interesting in politics are victims of the cultural divide between themselves and their subject. They should behave more like anthropologists, looking beyond the dances we politicians put on for the tourists to find out how we really live and what motivates us.

I experienced the culture shock that comes from crossing that divide one day when I had to call a lobbyist for a campaign contribution -- a lobbyist about whom, in my previous career, I had written a sharply critical article. I was nervous and prepared a long explanation of my article and why it showed that I would use his contribution to bring good government to Anchorage.

Instead, the conversation was extremely brief. As I started my pitch, the lobbyist interrupted me and said, "I'll make this real simple, Charles." He asked if certain elected officials were supporting me. I said they were. He said, "I'll get you some checks."

And he did.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe