Tar baby

I've been listening to NPR recently, and I really enjoy their lengthy investigations and discussions about interesting topics. Of course, it's still hard to cover a topic completely on the radio, and so things inevitably have to be left out. As a conservative, it's always interesting to me to notice exactly what NPR chooses to omit from its lengthy in-depth coverage of important issues.

Today was a great example: NPR covered Ted Kennedy's death nonstop, with special emphasis given to his vacant senate seat. The seat can't be filled by appointment with the laws as presently construed in MA, since it must be filled by special election 5 months from now. Of course, this would mean depriving the senate of a (D) Senator during a crucial period, which is cause for great hand-wringing. NPR repeated a soundbite several times from Deval Patrick (the MA governor), which said that it would be unjust to deprive Massachusetts of one of its senate seats during such a crucial period. Much discussion was devoted to the people who could run for Kennedy's seat, Kennedy's final request that if someone were appointed to take his place in the interim (assuming the laws were changed), that appointed person would not run in the special election to take his place for good, etc.

However, with all this coverage, NPR didn't find it interesting to mention how MA got in this mess, which I believe is a very interesting story in its own right. Like most states, MA provided for vacant senate seats by having the governor appoint someone until the next election. However, during Kerry's run for president in 2004, MA was governed by an (R): Mitt Romney. This could have lead to an unthinkable situation: Romney could have appointed a Republican to fill Kerry's seat if Kerry won the presidency. To avert this disaster, the MA legislature changed the laws to make them "more fair": vacant seats could only be filled by special election, 5 months after the vacancy was created. Now, of course, this law, created for completely partisan purposes, has backfired, since Obama is going to need every vote he can get to pass his agenda, and the law is reducing the number of Democrats in the senate. Accordingly, I expect the MA legislature will simply revise the law, as quickly as possible.

I agree with this - while the MA legislature is revising the law, why don't they just be honest and make the law state that senators from MA must be from the Democratic party? That way they won't have to change the law back if ever (horrors) a Republican were governor again.

Interesting story, no? I would love to be a fly on the wall when NPR was discussing their coverage of stories like this one. I would like to find out if they decided not to run this part of the story out of overt and considered bias, or whether the bias is just so ingrained that it's automatic and subconscious, making it completely obvious to everyone that matters that this part of the story is superfluous to any useful thorough challenging investigation of deep important issues.

In any case, this whole mess is greatly entertaining.