By now it’s pretty clear to anyone paying attention to politics — or baseball — that D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty is no longer the darling of the local media.
Reporters have been dogging the young mayor for weeks. WTOP’s Mark Seagraves stuck a microphone in Fenty’s face in the half-light of one recent dawn as the mayor was about to board a plane for New York.
Seagraves, one of the most serious and relentless reporters around, asked why Fenty was going to the Big Apple. Business? Pleasure? Schools? Visits with Mayor Bloomberg?
Fenty told Seagraves to stuff it and walked away.
The relationship between Fenty and the local pressies started to turn sour when reporters realized Fenty rarely answered their questions. He evaded, he stalled, he delegated. But he rarely gave straight answers.
When Fenty took his family to Dubai last month and failed to alert the media, the press went into a tizzy. How could the chief executive skip town? Why Dubai? Who paid? Fenty answered, kind of, and moved on — to the “business of serving the people of Washington, D.C.” This is one of his fave lines to deflect questioners.
Then we have the strange case of the decommissioned firetruck that Fenty’s administration was to send to a beach town in the Dominican Republic. Reporters want to know why and how and how much and all those niggling questions reporters tend to ask. Fenty has delegated answers to his government, which has clammed up.
Now we have Ticketgate II. For the second season, Fenty has declined to share tickets to Washington Nationals games with the city council, as the team says he must.
When WRC-TV’s Tom Sherwood pressed Fenty on the tickets, the mayor said: “So I do want to say this: You know, I really love everything about my job, and one of the things I love most about my job is the media.”
Here’s why:
1. Back in 2005, the media loved the energetic young council member running for mayor. We helped elect him.
2. Compared with Marion Barry and Linda Cropp, Fenty presented a new and exciting leader. We projected it.
3. The media likes bold strokes, so Fenty’s school takeover was great copy.
4. Fenty looks great in running shorts, which makes great video of him doing triathlons.
5. Reporters prefer action to process; Fenty’s constant movement makes him better copy than the plodding city council.
6. Fenty has been able to control leaks, so his administration speaks with one voice.
7. By showing Fenty as the young, activist mayor, the press helped him raise millions of dollars for his re-election and scare off opponents.
8. As a student of D.C. politics, Fenty knows Barry won three mayoral elections despite constant negative portrayals in the press.
9. Only rarely have reporters broken through his pat answer that he’s “working hard for the people of the District.”
10. He tells media types he loves them, for good reason. He has neutered them.
