Comes the Devolution

A few years back, a veteran statehouse reporter in California named Ginger Rutland managed to roil the usually hard-to-impress Sacramento press corps with a particularly stinging backhanded compliment. "You've got to understand," she said as she addressed a public forum on the press and state legislatures, "reporters are lazy and stupid, but they're not venal."

Rutland had tarred with a single brush-stroke a diverse group of reporters - some of the state's best and some of its most lethargic. But there was truth in her words: like most capital press corps, Sacramento's has been, for all its bright spots, guilty on more than a few occasions of pack journalism, of uninspired coverage, of failing to dig beneath the surface to explain how power gets exercised. When the state's legislative leaders sat down with Governor Pete Wilson last summer to hammer out a budget, for instance, there were plenty of stories on what was in the budget, but next to nothing on how the state's most powerful deal-makers had actually arrived at their decisions on how to divvy up the state's resources.

In the end, Rutland's comments just got her colleagues in a lather; she was hounded for months afterward. Which is a shame, because the questions she raised about the quality of statehouse journalism - not just in Sacramento, but across the country - are about to take on considerable weight. And reporters who cover state government are going to have plenty of cause over the next few years to ponder whether they're doing an adequate job.

The reason, of course, is that the people and institutions they cover are expected to take on a raft of responsibilities from the federal government. Republicans in Congress - and to some extent, Democrats in the Clinton administration - have made it clear that they intend to devolve power from Washington to the state capitals. Officials in Albany, Phoenix, Jefferson City, and elsewhere who once left such matters as welfare, Medicaid, and housing to Congress and the White House, are now going to be carrying a good share of the public-policy burden on those issues and conceivably others.

In fact, as much as congressional Republicans like to talk about a "revolution," states for the last decade have been taking a growing role in experimenting with fundamental changes in the way government operates. Health care reform, welfare reform, "reinventing government," the "property rights rebellion" - all were hot topics in state capitals before members of Congress and the administration got into the act, and the better local news organizations were already on top of them. And it is impossible to tell at the moment just how profound or long-lasting the impact of the current congressional ferment will be. "Maybe it will be a true revolution from D.C.," is how Dan Morain, a Los Angeles Times staff writer in Sacramento, puts it. "But I've heard that before."

Yet we clearly are, as a country, engaged in reshuffling the federalism deck. As a result, statehouse reporters will be faced with questions they really haven't had to worry about before. These will range from specific policy dilemmas, such as whether a state will fund nursing-home care for the elderly, to the broader issues of whether legislators and administrators can handle the new responsibilities they've been given and whether, indeed, those new responsibilities are all they're cracked up to be.

These are issues not just for state capital reporters. They apply equally to journalists covering national affairs who have grown accustomed to Washington as the political center of the country. Last spring, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen came out with the rather gloomy prediction that the national media would fail to boost their coverage of state and local government, for the most part because it's seen as being neither as interesting nor as prestigious a topic as Washington. "My guess," he wrote, "is that the Republicans in Congress know all this. When they send programs to the states they are, in effect, sending them over the horizon: let the states do what they want - and to whom they want. As with the proverbial tree that falls in the forest, no sound will be heard."

Cohen was worried about scandals going uncovered - the welfare block grant that somehow winds up paying for county roads, for example. And there is a lot more that the press will have to be looking at vigilantly. Will the states indeed engage in the much-predicted "race to the bottom" by scrambling to provide fewer welfare benefits than their neighbors? How do particularly innovative programs - or programs trumpeted as innovative - actually stack up? To what extent will the budgetary burdens that block grants impose wind up in the lap not of a state but of its cities and counties? As Dean Baquet, national editor of The New York Times, says of devolution, "If it happens, it's obviously going to be one of the big government stories of the next few years."

Some major news outlets have a head start. The Wall Street Journal has always paid some attention to state and local stories as illustrations of larger points, and in recent months The New York Times has made it a priority, as Baquet puts it, "to take the debate out of Washington and write about it around the country." The paper has done stories on welfare reform in Michigan and Mississippi, health care reform in Tennessee, and the overall capacity of state legislators to respond to new responsibilities - a story that many state dailies have so far ignored.

With the focus of big and medium-sized news organizations traditionally so much on Washington - and still there, in many editors' minds - national issues are handled sometimes by the Washington bureau and sometimes by regional bureaus. But as Alan Murray, Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, points out, "The danger with shared responsibility is that no one feels responsible." Moreover, while national newspapers and news programs don't have much trouble generating stories from one state capital or city, they've never been especially good at putting them in broader perspective. That will change as national reporters build a state-by-state base of knowledge, but it will clearly take them time to become deeply familiar with the cross-section of states they'll need if they're to give an informed reading of national trends.

Which is where daily coverage of state capitals around the country comes in. If devolution truly happens, the quality of reporting coming from state capitals will become crucial not just to home-state audiences, but nationally as well.

Beyond the strengths and weaknesses of individual statehouse reporters lies perhaps the most critical unanswered question: How much urgency about coverage of state government will be felt back in the newsroom? You won't, obviously, find many daily news organizations that openly profess indifference toward what goes on in the state capital. The reality, though, is that over the last fifteen years or so, there has been a decided slackening of dedication to covering either the legislature or the executive branch.

The trend has been most noticeable with television. There are exceptions - most major stations in Dallas, Houston, and Austin, for example, have some sort of regular presence at the Texas capitol - but in many major state capitals around the country, from Albany to Springfield to Sacramento, television reporters are notable largely for their day-to-day absence from the scene. They show up for the big stories, such as a death penalty vote in Albany, and for the crusade stories, like the vote on a tougher animal-cruelty law in the Washington State legislature after the mutilation of a zoo donkey by some children. But there are fewer television reporters with a working knowledge of state government than there were a decade ago. "There is a huge gap in how well broadcast outlets report on legislatures," says Yolette Garcia, executive producer for public affairs at KERA-TV, the public television station in Dallas. "A chief reason is that the staffing of reporters at these legislative bodies is thinning for broadct."

There is a cost to that. Speaking of New York City outlets, Frank LeBrun, a columnist for the Albany Times Union and a local television commentator, remarked:"All the major television stations rely on affiliates for feeds. An issue like the death penalty will draw all the stations from the city on the day it's announced, but then they go away again. So the times that television will actually break something or explain a complex issue in a meaningful way for viewers are as rare as moondust."

Many news directors and station managers have found reasons to drop the statehouse beat, despite the fact that what goes on in state government affects everyone in their viewing audience.

The decision often comes down to money and glitz. State capitals don't seem to have enough of either. It's expensive to keep up a bureau, as well as to house a full production crew for the duration of a legislative session.

"What goes on in state capitals is generally not sexy, and is often far removed from the city in which commercial news operations are located," notes Michael Aron, the senior political correspondent for NJN, the New Jersey public television network. "Although things are decided in state capitals that affect the lives of citizens, so are things at the city level, right under the noses of these people, and at the federal level, where tape is constantly being fed all day."

The picture with newspapers is more complicated. Nearly every major state daily has a capital bureau, and many second- and third-tier papers do as well, but even within the top ranks, there are great differences in the resources allotted. The range runs from the Los Angeles Times, with eleven full-time staff members in its Sacramento bureau, through papers such as The Miami Herald, with four capital reporters (and one regional writer based there), the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and San Jose Mercury News, each with three, to the Chicago Tribune, which recently added a second reporter in Springfield after a two-year stretch with just one, and The New York Times, which maintains just one full-time reporter in Albany, though it adds two more during legislative sessions. By contrast, its Washington bureau has about fifty newspeople.

Many editors seem to be waiting for devolution to take hold before they decide whether to beef up statehouse coverage. "I've been doing essentially the same thing as the state - taking a wait-and-see approach," says Tom Brown, the government and politics editor at The Seattle Times. "It's pretty clear that there will be some fairly substantial impact, especially in social-service areas, but it's still unclear to me when that's going to happen, which programs it's going to affect, and what, in turn, that's going to mean for the kind of coverage we do."

Quality of coverage depends on more than sheer numbers of statehouse reporters, of course. For one thing, reporting philosophies undoubtedly count for more - the Mercury News, for instance, is generally regarded as more interested in probing into the workings of Sacramento than other California papers with bureaus of similar size. And many newspapers, particularly in states where the capital is within relatively easy driving distance of the paper's hometown, have been using beat reporters to broaden coverage of state government. "It's not a bad thing," says Jim Simon, a regional reporter and former capital reporter for The Seattle Times, "to cover these issues from outside the perspective" of the state capital. Even so, he adds, "You don't have the whole picture if you don't know what's happening in
 the legislature."

There are clear benefits that size and a staff dedicated to the statehouse bring. With its large staff, the Los Angeles Times can afford to look for stories that are, as bureau chief Armando Acuña puts it, "a little cut above what everybody else is doing"; indeed, the Times recently created an investigative unit to examine how state programs and officials are performing. Conversely, notes Rick Pearson, the Chicago Tribune's lead Springfield correspondent and its only reporter at the state capital until recently, small bureaus will have a much more difficult time breaking stories about performance. "Other than the loyal opposition, you have to count on the auditor-general doing audits of programs and keeping an eye on vendors," he says. "When you're on your own, you're subject to whatever independent people can find out." Moreover, a one- or two-person bureau that's expected both to cover state government and to follow stories into the community often ends up sacrificing one or the other. "The fewer people we had," says Jim Simon, "the harder and harder it got for me to get out of Olympia and around the state."

Then there's the issue of longevity. At one time, capital press corps were the domain of veterans, reporters who had been around for a decade or two or three. They are now clearly a disappearing breed, and these days it's not unusual to find a statehouse press room whose senior writer has been there at most seven or eight years, with most reporters staying but two or three.

There are some advantages to this change. "When I first started doing statehouse reporting fifteen years ago, the place was dominated by guys who'd been there twenty years who'd settled into real formula reporting," says Peter Callaghan, now the political editor for the Tacoma News Tribune, in Washington State. "I can't count the number of times I'd be working on a hot story, and some guy would say, ‘Oh, Christ! I did that in '58 and '65 and '70, you don't need to do it again.'"

But reporters who have a sense of history, who can clarify how long-running policy debates have progressed, will be crucial to the public's understanding of issues in a way that legislators themselves no longer can be in the term-limit age. Moreover, state capitals are complicated places, with their own language, their own customs, and their own, often convoluted, histories, all of which have a bearing on day-to-day coverage. "It takes years to develop sources," says Steven Fromm, a Trenton Times statehouse reporter. "People have to see your face every day. If they don't, when you ask questions, it's, ‘Who the hell are you?' They're not going to risk tipping you off to something if they don't know you." As Nick Wilson, a longtime Arkansas state senator, once put it, newcomers "have to work at face value - and if you work with politicians, you know that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what's actually going on."

As devolution proceeds, news operations that have had a chance - and have chosen - to pay attention to some of the emerging complex issues will have a leg up. In Illinois, for instance, a long-running battle by Republican Governor Jim Edgar to get a federal waiver for Medicaid reform has given the state's capital reporters a lot of preparation for the devolution era. "I'm certain we've had more Medicaid slugs this year than the national desk," says Rob Karwath, the Chicago Tribune assistant metro editor in charge of politics.

"I've been in this business thirty-five years," says Sam Kinch, Jr., a statehouse veteran in Austin who now publishes a weekly newsletter on Texas politics, "and I have never seen anything that has the capability of causing so much change at the state level and so few reporters preparing themselves even by doing ‘what-if' stories. What's going to happen is, all this stuff's going to pass, and one day some bureau chief is going to say, ‘Oh! We've got to write about this,' and he'll have to send someone over to learn how to read the budget."

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