The Cameron Todd Willingham story has reached a new level. No longer will there be only strong suspicions of a cover up, but the Houston Chronicle, in a strong journalistic move, seeks to make public the papers Rick Perry saw the day Cameron Todd Willingham would later be executed.
The Houston Chronicle and Hearst Newspapers LLC announced a lawsuit against Governor Rick Perry.
The Houston Chronicle and Hearst Newspapers LLC are suing Gov. Rick Perry in an effort to force the release of a clemency report Perry received before denying a stay of execution to Cameron Todd Willingham.
The report is a summary and status of the case against Willingham that was given to Perry at 11:30 a.m. on the day of Willingham's 2004 execution in the fire deaths of his three daughters. Anti-death penalty advocates say modern fire forensics show the blaze cannot be proven as arson.
Perry's office has refused to release the report, claiming it is a privileged document. The clemency document was used by Perry in the process of deciding whether to give Willingham a 30-day stay of execution.
"When it comes to human life, there is no place the governor should be more transparent in his decision-making," said Jonathan Donnellan, an attorney for Hearst and the Chronicle.
"It should raise eyebrows that the governor is seeking to shield communications with his advisers as 'legal advice,' when the very idea of executive clemency power is to make a policy decision after the legal process has run its course," Donnellan said.
I applaud the Chronicle's decision to pursue this worthy goal. If they win, we will see more insight into Rick Perry's worst act as Governor on a long list of bad acts. I wish the Chronicle luck with their suit.
(Now that the Sotomayor hearings are on lunch break, I wanted to put this back atop the page. It is real, real big news for the day...until Hutchison announces her campaign totals later this afternoon. - promoted by Phillip Martin)
Texas newspaper publishers are talking about sharing their content -- outside the usual Associated Press pick-ups, sources say. The implications for the depth and breadth of state government and political news are huge. And dire.
We may have seen the first evidence of new sharing arrangements this weekend. Emily Ramshaw of the Dallas Morning news ran a story Saturday morning about the notorious private prison company, GEO Group,taking over a private psychiatric hospital in Montgomery County. The company's prisons have a history of sexual abuse, riots and suicides.
Texas officials wary of prison company contract
Copyright 2009 Houston Chonicle
July 11, 2009, 8:00PM
Did you catch that? "Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle."
No credit to the Associated Press, the normal avenue for stories taken from other papers. Maybe this was a copydesk error. However, word is that some editors have begun briefing their staffs on the new sharing arrangements.
Sources say publishers and editors have ratcheted up their efforts to come up with news while cutting staff. Additionally, word that Austin investment guru and innovative thinker and businessman John Thornton will soon begin publishing a Texas online newspaper has these same editors and publishers worried.
By sharing content, they hope to head-off competition from a well-funded, hard-hitting, aggressive, online news source that could do in Texas what Politico or Huffington Post have done nationally.
The distance between Austin and voters is already enormous. Layoffs and shrinking space for news in the troubled newspaper industry have meant a dramatic decline in coverage of state politics and government. Chasing distracted audiences, local television affiliates for the most part gave up on state political news long ago. Fires, wrecks, murders and sex are much more salable.
How many Texans even knew there was a regular session of the Legislature this year? How many know what happened? Damn few.
The fate of the dwindling capitol press is very much in doubt. Keep in mind that these are plum jobs, or were plum jobs. Typically, only the best and most responsible journalists were given a chance at the capitol beat. Lose them -- and we've already lost many great ones -- and Texas suffers.
If newspapers are already agreeing to share content, how long before they further reduce their Austin offices?
It's impossible to overestimate the importance of a large and diverse press corps. Not too many years ago, a major event in Austin would attract eight or more cameras and a dozen or more print reporters. Those multiple perspectives were key to accurate, broad reporting. Competition among journalists kept things lively.
We are in a Dark Age of state political and government news. Maybe it's just a transition period. But state blogs -- and there are many good ones like BOR -- have nowhere near the resources, the reporting experience or the reach of newspapers and local TV affiliates. There are high hopes that Thornton and maybe others will succeed in new era publishing. But it hasn't happened yet.
I don't have much sympathy for the corporatized ownership of newspapers. Their commitment to the public's right and need to know has long played second fiddle to their bottom lines. They've rationalized, downsized, and minimized their coverage of state news for years. Texans are paying the price, and that price could get much steeper in coming months and years.
Last night at 11:58 pm (wink, wink), just as was suspected, the Texas Senate unanimously passed through a net metering bill, HB 1243, with solar SB 545 amended on as a bonus. This is great news for Texas consumers, the environment, and solar power.
Well, we did our homework, and here's what we've found.
HB 1243 will ensure that owners of solar installations, small wind turbines, or biogas generators get paid a fair price for the excess power they produce. SB 545 - which after the Voter ID slowdown, we thought was dead - increases incentives for distributed solar power generation by creating a pool of $500 million in solar rebates over the next 5 years. It also calls for a pilot program with a minimum funding of $4 million to put solar on schools (nudge: the State Energy Conservation Office could potentially spend considerably more of their pending stimulus funds to further these projects) and will create thousands of green, local jobs across the state of Texas.
Another amendment to the bill added on SB 2349. This provision would allow oil wells that create natural gas, but not enough to justify paying for collection, to build a generator to run the gas through, make electricity, and sell it back into the grid. The bill would limit production to 2 MW so that they can provide distributed generation. As of right now, they're just flaring that gas off, so this is definitely a good thing.
According to our friends at Environment Texas (via the Houston Chronicle's NewsWatch: Energy blog), the amended HB 1243 also:
• Requires home builders to offer solar as a standard option in developments with 50 homes or more.
• Prevents homeowners associations from blocking solar panel installations
• Allows up to 70% of incentive funds to be used for utility-scale solar projects
• Allows the Public Utility Commission to extend the program for an additional five years and another $500 million if it determined that a "substantial" amount of manufacturing of solar generation products located in Texas after the initial five-year program
• Requires electric co-ops to allow consumers to interconnect solar to the grid
• Clarifies that consumers will not have to register as a utility and that third party ownership of solar is allowed
• For the next two years, requires retail electric providers to pay at least five cents per kilowatt hour for surplus solar and four cents for other renewable technologies and directs the PUC to determine a fair market price that will become a new "floor" following the two years
• Creates a "Made in Texas" program to certify and encourage Texans to buy locally manufactured solar panels and other energy products. As a result, locally produced products qualify for a 20% larger rebate than imports.
Now that HB 1243 has successfully passed through both chambers of the legislature, we've just got to wait and see what comes out of conference committee, where bill authors from both sides will smooth out the differences between their bills. Many thanks to all of you that wrote e-mails and made phone calls in support of these bills. This is a tremendous victory for Texas solar. Keep your fingers crossed that we can send this bill to Governor Perry's desk!
Original post written by Citizen Sarah at Texas Vox
Houston Chronicle political reporter Alan Bernstein has decided to leave the paper to work for Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia.
Bernstein's departure comes just over a month after long time Chronicle political writer Clay Robison left the paper. With the departures of Bernstein and Robison, the paper has lost a combined 67 years of Houston-based political reporting experience.
In the Sheriff's office, Bernstein's title will be Director of Public Affairs. The Houston Press reports that the position entails "working with government officials, the rank and file of the department, and overseeing the spokespeople who give out the details of incidents the HCSO is involved in."
From Editor & Publisher, we get the news that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Houston Chronicle, and the Austin American-Statesman are among the top 15 newspapers to have gained in audience from this time last year. They actually list the top 25, but all the TX papers are in the top 15. From E&P:
Here are the top 25 dailies that had the biggest gain in audience when taking print and online readership into account. The papers are ranked by net combined audience (past seven days in print and 30 days online), according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations for the six months ending March 2009 compared to the same period in March 2008.
GREENWICH (CONN.) TIME -- 111,824 -- 30.74%
THE BIRMINGHAM (ALA.) NEWS -- 781,047 -- 11.85%
THE TIMES-PICAYUNE, NEW ORLEANS -- 820,374 -- 11.72%
WILKES-BARRE (PA.) TIMES LEADER -- 196,229 -- 10.45%
FORT WORTH (TEXAS) STAR-TELEGRAM -- 1,236,205 -- 7.09%
THE PATRIOT-NEWS, HARRISBURG, PA. -- 496,700 -- 6.45%
HOUSTON CHRONICLE -- 2,507,835 -- 6.13%
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES -- 1,297,866 -- 6.09%
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN -- 861,105 -- 5.97%
NAPLES (FLA.) DAILY NEWS -- 265,181 -- 5.97%
The key, of course, is that these figures combine print and online readership. Not sure if you're counted twice if you read the print version and the online version (I imagine you are -- I don't know how they'd control that unless it was a survey, and these are raw figures). In any case, it gets to the quirk of the newspaper industry's problem:
They have plenty of readers. In fact, they have more readers. And as much as some want to wail and moan about the internet and the economic crisis, those aren't the real reasons why the newspaper industry is flailing. Newspaper industry leaders were aware of the coming rise of the internet over a decade ago, and basically sat on their hands. The recent economic crisis merely exacerbated problems that had existed for years -- (1) too many editors on staff, (2) companies demanding too large of a profit, and (3) companies refusing to plan for higher gas prices and increased cost of shipping/cutting their product -- paper.
Most political forces aren't helping matters...though I'd argue there are different levels of blame. Democrats get mad at things like this:
I'll stop there out of mercy for the newspaper industry. But that's how Democrats criticize the newspaper industry. Republicans, on the other hand...
The evisceration of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s by conservative Republicans allowed the rise of Rush Limbaugh, who then promoted more conservative Republican policies such as further media consolidation to spread Rush to more channels across the board, along with increased capital to fund more right-wing talk radio.
And...
In any case -- despite their faults and their attackers (those both fair and not so fair), the people are still going to traditional sources of news. They may also be getting their news from the internet -- which the latest Pew Report clearly stated -- but there is still a demand for information from traditional sources of news.
Tomorrow, I'll look at the absolute wrong approach, and hopefully on Wednesday or Thursday talk about the better approach. In the mean time, feel free to discuss your thoughts about all of this in the comments.
Join Chris Bell online as he debates Republican Joan Huffman over at the Houston Chronicle online.
You can visit the Chron blog at noon Tuesday, December 8, as the two Senate candidates for the District 17 state Senate talk to the people of Texas.
You get to write some of the questions. They'll write their answers. The words will be posted on this blog in real time. Call it a keyboard debate. If you'd like, eat lunch as you follow the remarks.
Was I the only one whose jaw hit the keyboard upon reading the Houston Chronicle's endorsement of Obama/Biden this morning?
After carefully observing the Democratic and Republican nominees in drawn-out primary struggles as well as in the general campaign, including three debates, the Chronicle strongly believes that the ticket of Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden offers the best choice to lead the United States on a new course into the second decade of the 21st century.
While newspaper endorsements might mean little in the voting both, each candidate relishes every little push of help they can get if the race for their office stands extremely tight. Such is the case with Nick Lampson, who is defending a seat that our Burnt Orange Political Report rated a toss-up. A little help came today with an endorsement from the Houston Chronicle.
With looming national elections likely to cement his party's hold on Congress, constituents should carefully consider their community interest in choosing between Lampson and Republican Pete Olson.
[...]
He has also worked to create a presence in the district, attending hundreds of town hall meetings to convince constituents of his sincerity.
"I believed that if I could show people that I was going to be available and accessible to them differently than what they'd ever seen before," says Lampson, "then they would honor that and respect me enough to send me back as their representative."
Equally as important, if Lampson wins he will be in a position to use his accumulated seniority to head a key House subcommittee overseeing NASA during the next session. He holds a strong commitment to increased funding for manned spacecraft development in the future.
This is clearly one election where the district's pocketbook interests should outweigh partisan considerations at the ballot box.
Although many conservatives in the district might reprimand the idea of earmarks, the Chronicle reminds Houstonians of one important factor: it is one reason you might actually be able to vote for a Democrat even if you are voting your pocketbook. And since Nick Lampson has kept his job in mind since being elected to CD22, that makes him the best choice.
Yesterday, I linked to the Clay Robison's story about how John Cornyn had politicized Hurricane Dolly.
Cornyn spokesman Kevin McLaughlin e-mailed Robison informing him that the press release in question had been issued by Cornyn's senate office, not his campaign.
McLaughlin seemed to think he was making a relevant point. In reality, however, the relevation seemed to further cement what Robison had written.
Clearly partisan messages should not be coming from tax-payer funded offices. John Cornyn's campaign team seems to disagree but I think the people of Texas are with us on this one.
Robison also includes in his post a quote from McLaughlin that seems to threaten the reporter with limited access to Cornyn if he continues with his ... well, fair and accurate reporting.
Fortunately, the levees held against the flood waters, but political anger was gushing from the Cornyn camp today. It seems the e-mail wasn't sent by the Republican senator's campaign, but by Cornyn's official, taxpayer-funded office in Washington.
"Your inability to tell the difference between the two is very disconcerting," sputtered Cornyn's campaign spokesman Kevin McLaughlin in an e-mail.
Disconcerting? Perhaps. But it often is difficult to tell the difference between Cornyn's campaign handouts and his official pronouncements, particularly since the official messages (the ones we taxpayers pay for) are headed by Cornyn's name in big letters against a background of those favorite campaign colors -- red, white and blue.
And the message had partisan overtones. By addressing the Senate's Democratic leader, Cornyn's office seemed to be trying to blame the Democrats for underfunding the levee system, when, in fact, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have failed to adequately protect thousands of Valley residents from disastrous flooding.
"Your mistakes have consequences," McLaughlin said.
So does congressional hand-sitting.
In the last 36 hours, John Cornyn and his employees have politicized a dangerous hurricane and threatened a reporter.
This is an unofficial part of our "Shattering Blogger Stereotypes" series. The myth shattered -- that bloggers hate the traditional media. The following is a report on an extensive study I completed as part of my coursework at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. -- Phillip
In the early twentieth century, five Russian-born Jews living in Manhattan passed out some leaflets denouncing President Woodrow Wilson. They were accused of violating the Espionage Act. They were arrested for criticizing the government, and ultimately -- in Abrams vs. the United States -- the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the arrests.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his dissent, wrote that the leaflets created no real danger, arguing instead that they embraced one of the central tenants of the constitution: a "marketplace of ideas"
[...] The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas...that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.
Today, in the early twenty-first century, information consumers seek a free trade of ideas much broader than what the market has traditionally offered. Print and television journalism competes with online journalism, where electronic leaflets travel much farther than the streets of Manhattan. YouTube videos, blogs, and Facebook messages are all relevant players in today’s marketplace of ideas.
Texas’ newspapers are adapting to the new online medium in noticeably different ways, especially when it comes to political reporting. An examination of the nearly 1,000 blog posts featured on the respective political blogs of the Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, and Austin American-Statesman during the month leading up to the Texas primary shows that formal conventions of journalism often do not make their way from the paper pages to the web pages of Texas’ leading newspapers.
For those of us counting on the successful adaptation of Texas’ political reporting in the rapidly expanding realm of web-based media, the loss of formal convention may be a very, very good thing.
Introduction: About the Study
The purpose of the study wasn’t to determine which paper had the best online coverage – it was to examine what kind of coverage is out there in the first place. Reporters from each of these papers were interviewed for the original study; however, their quotes and input will not be directly attributed here, since the original study was conducted for academic purposes and to ensure their anonymity is respected.
The study examined at length the methods and attitudes of three of Texas’ major newspaper political blogs, focusing on the time period after Super Tuesday (February 6) through just before the Texas primary (March 3):
It should be noted that the Chronicle maintains several political blogs, including Texas on the Potomac, which has a national focus. For the purposes of the study, only the posts on Texas Politics, which has a Texas focus, were tracked, since most of the print reporters that cover Texas politics only blog on the Texas Politics blog. The study was completed for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government course, “Press, Politics, and Public Policy,” as taught by Professor Tom Fiedler, former Editor of the Miami Herald. As the general election approaches, similar studies will be conducted for comparison. Finding an Online Voice: The Choice between Formal and Informal Language
In 1961, Theodore White’s book, “The Making of the President: 1960” set the standard for political and campaign reporting. Ever since that time, political journalists have used White’s model – along with the very traditional “who, what, where, when, why, and how” formula – to create and sustain a formal language in their writing. The use of traditional, non-changing formal language signals a context of objectivity and authority for most readers.
However, many of Texas newspapers’ political blogs have abandoned traditional conventions in favor of a much more informal, opinion-based language. As Chart #1 shows below, the more posts that are written on Texas newspapers’ political blogs, the greater the chance that the language used will be informal.
Chart #1: Type of Language Used from 2/6 thru 3/3
Houston Chronicle
Austin American- Statesman
Dallas Morning News
Total / Average
# of total blog posts
172
304
510
986
Formal
61.6%
46.1%
23.3%
43.7%
Informal
25.0%
50.3%
71.2%
48.8%
Mixed
13.4%
3.6%
5.5%
7.5%
For the purposes of the study, formal language is considered “traditional newspaper” writing, often in 3rd-person. Informal language is considered “conversational-style” writing, which may combine first and second-person language and feature humor and/or editorializing. Mixed language-posts consists primarily of formal language but contain editorializing, humor, or a call for reader response not normally found with the use of formal language.
The Dallas Morning News reporters wrote nearly three times as many posts for their blog than their Houston Chronicle counterparts; not surprisingly, their language was much more informal. Strengthening the observed correlation, the Austin American-Statesman finished in the middle of each category.
