"Be inspired by the beleaguered but unintimidated reporters of Chris Christie's New Jersey" (Rachel Maddow)

I think Murray Kempton would have approved
of Rachel's WaPo column.

"It's annoying to pay for information -- I know. But if you don't subscribe to your local paper or pony up to get behind its online paywall, who's going to pay reporters to cover the news where you live? A free press isn't that kind of "free." An accountable democracy doesn't work without real information, gathered from the ground up, about people in power, everywhere. Be inspired by the beleaguered but unintimidated reporters of Chris Christie's New Jersey: Whatever your partisan affiliation, or lack thereof, subscribe to your local paper today. It's an act of civic virtue."

-- the conclusion of Rachel Maddow's Washington Post
column, "Democracy needs dogged local journalism"

by Ken

It was listed first under "Editorial" in this morning's Washington Post "Today's Headlines" e-wrap-up, as "In praise of the watchdogs," a catchy head that's actually pretty descriptive of the piece, apart from not giving us any idea what kind of watchdogs the writer might have in mind.

That gap is filled by the head on at least the online version: "Democracy needs dogged local journalism." The slug that provides the URL for the online version is even more descriptive: "NJ bridge scandal proves the need for dogged local journalism."

What it is is Rachel Maddow's new-ish monthly Post column, and it is one sweet piece of work. It's a rip-roaring tribute to those dogged local reporters who get hold of stories that important people don't want aired and then stick with them in spite of often intense pressure not to do so and finally reward their readers with eye-opening revelations that shake their corner of the world, and often beyond. As Rachel puts it:

Most of the time, national news happens out loud: at news conferences, on the floor of Congress, in splashy indictments or court rulings. But sometimes, the most important news starts somewhere more interesting, and it has to be dug up. Our democracy depends on local journalism, whether it's a beat reporter slogging through yet another underattended local commission meeting, or a state political reporter with enough of an ear to the ground to know where the governor might be when he isn't where he says he is, or a traffic columnist who's nobody's fool.

The starting point for Rachel's case, as you may have gathered, is NJ Gov. Kris KrispyKreme & His KrispyKronies, and at the top of the list of kronies is the Krispyman's high school bud, David "Wild Man" Wildstein, and if you didn't know enough about this psychopathic leech who until his timely resignation sucked blood and treasure out of the people of New York and New Jersey with his krony-patronage appointment to the Port Authority of NY and NJ, where he had, as Rachel puts it, "a highly paid position that, conveniently, had no job description." The job description as we now surmise it seems to have been combination patronage leech and personal enforcer for his Jersey boss. Let's let Rachel tell his story (lots of links onsite):

If you type "Shawn Boburg" into your Web browser address bar, a strange thing happens. Boburg is a reporter for The Record newspaper, in Bergen County, N.J. But ShawnBoburg.com sends visitors to The Record's rival, Newark's Star-Ledger.

The man who bought the rights to Boburg's online name -- and who presumably engineered the nasty little redirect -- is David Wildstein, who last week became the country's most high-profile political appointee. After his high school classmate Chris Christie was elected governor of New Jersey in 2009, Wildstein was appointed to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for a highly paid position that, conveniently, had no job description.

Wildstein, who has since resigned, was held in contempt last week by a state legislature committee for refusing to answer questions about his role in the four-day traffic disaster that gridlocked the town of Fort Lee, N.J., last September.

According to reporting in The Record, Wildstein has made a habit of buying the Web addresses of people who cross his path in New Jersey politics -- including the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in 2012 and a mid-level official at the Federal Aviation Administration who helped forge a firefighting agreement with the Port Authority that Wildstein disliked. While he was at the Port Authority, Wildstein bought the online names of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's top appointees to the agency, including Executive Director Pat Foye, who sounded the alarm about the Fort Lee scheme. Wildstein's redirect on PatFoye.com sends visitors to the Web site of the New York Yankees.

It's one thing for public officials to subject one another to that kind of low-level, neener-neener harassment, but in New Jersey, reporters have been targeted too. Wildstein snatched up and redirected ShawnBoburg.com after Boburg wrote a (not terribly unflattering) profile of the intensely private Wildstein last year and an article on Christie's patronage hiring.

The long knives that New Jersey politicians have out for each other was the stuff of legend (and excellent TV drama) well before the bridge scandal. But the documents released thus far show how much the governor's staff and appointees hated not only rival public officials but also the press.

Christie's spokesman forwarded to Wildstein an e-mail exchange with a Star-Ledger reporter who was inquiring about the scandal, calling the reporter an "[expletive]ing mutt." After a request for comment came in from a member of the Star-Ledger editorial board, the governor's spokesman erupted to Wildstein, "[expletive] him and the S-L."

While the Christie appointees at the Port Authority asserted "no response" over and over to reporters' requests for information, the governor publicly belittled journalists who had the temerity to ask him about the scandal. "I worked the cones, actually," Christie scoffed in December, referring to the purported traffic study. "Unbeknownst to everybody, I was actually the guy out there. . . . You really are not serious with that question."

You can believe, if you like (until we get evidence to the contrary, that Krispy didn't know nuttin' about what his krew of kronies were up to at the Port Authority, but I'll tell you one thing about the Wild Man, with 99.999 percent certainty: There wasn't the slightest doubt in his pox-infested head that the orders to turn Fort Lee into a parking lot came straight from the piehole of his old buddy NJ Fats. And he doesn't seem to have had the slightest qualm about executing his orders. At least there's discipline in the boss's chain of command.

And speaking of the boss, Rachel writes:

Even in his ostensibly conciliatory news conference last week, Christie chided the media, telling a reporter who asked whether he had considered resigning, "That's a crazy question, man."

In fact, a Rasmussen poll out this week found that a majority of New Jersey residents would want the governor to resign if he had advance knowledge of the bridge plot.

If it weren't for the dogged local press corps, Christie would still be ridiculing this story, attacking the legislators investigating it and persuading most of the national press to dismiss it.

And Rachel reminds us that the slimy details that landed NJ Fats's kronykrew, if not yet the kronymaster, in the soup, were extracted by local talent.

The first reporting on the scandal was by the local traffic columnist in The Record, John Cichowski. The week of the traffic tie-ups, Cichowski was already calling bullpucky on the Port Authority line that some sort of "study" was to blame. He pointed to political retribution as a more likely explanation. A steady stream of local reporting followed until, ultimately, Shawn Boburg's scoop last Wednesday in The Record: the governor's deputy chief of staff e-mailing Wildstein, "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee."

And "the pattern of how the scandal came to national attention," Rachel argues, "is familiar." And she runs down some choice examples, which you can read about for yourself:

• the saga of former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, and the public ridicule his charming missus heaped on Hartford Courant reporter Jon Lender for his reports alleging gubernatorial corruption. Lender stayed on the job, and in the end the governor, or rather ex-governor, went to the slammer.

• the story of then-SC Gov. Mark Sanford's mythical hiking of the Appalachian Trail was punctured when "reporter Gina Smith from the State newspaper drove 200 miles to be in the Atlanta airport at 6 a.m. as Sanford got off his overseas flight. His ruse thus unraveled."

• the lengths to which the Arkansas Times wen, teaming up with "journalists experienced in covering pipelines" to determine that ExxonMobil had an aging pipeline under Mayflower, Arkansas, and "to get to the bottom of what ExxonMobil did and whether other communities with buried pipelines should feel protected by existing regulations."

We've already read Rachel's diagnosis of the importance of local journalism, and why it's so important that we fund it. In my book that's one helluva way to make good use of the forum of the Washington Post's opinion pages, and I think Rachel would have gotten a smile from a man whose smile would have meant a lot: the late Murray Kempton, who until pretty much his death was still writing a four-times-a-week column for Newsday usually based on his own legwork, as often as possible achieved via his bicycle.

Murray (if I may be so familiar) didn't have much use for newspaper columnists who used their space to suck their thumbs or stroke their egos, establishing their hipness among the elite of the commentariat. The kind of columnist he admired, he wrote once (the man he was praising being the New York Post's James Wechsler), was the kind whose columns were most often photocopied and used to gain redress for people without power against people who had power over them.

I'm sorry to offer such a crude paraphrase of what Murray wrote, but I've long since lost my copy of that column, which was titled "About Jimmy Wechsler," and was written on the occasion of Murray's last departure from the Post. (He did a lot of circulating among the city's papers until he finally settled in at Newsday.) But I'm pretty sure I've got the gist right, and it's the test I've since applied to op-ed writing. Like I said, I think Murray would have enjoyed this column of Rachel's.

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