The aftershocks of the premature reporting of former Congressman Joe Skeen's passing continued to be felt in New Mexico's media and political community Wednesday as well as on Capitol Hill in Washington. The main focus is on how the unfortunate information made it's way to the public. Sources very close to the Republican legend told "New Mexico Politics With Joe Monahan" that they think they have an idea on how the rumor started. To paraphrase them: We think it came from a former high elected Republican official of the same generation as Joe. We'll leave the guessing on who it is to you. But that official, according to our sources, erroneously tipped off the night editors of the ABQ Journal who naturally followed-up on the information by calling State GOP Chair Ramsay Gorham who took it at face value and later told an inquiring KRQE-TV anchorman Dick Knipfing that the 76 year old Skeen had died. Dick, again quite naturally, ran with the story which Gorham later called to retract after speaking to sources close to Skeen.
In an e mail to us a top editor at the Journal made the point that the paper never published a Skeen death notice and argued that inquiring about Skeens's apparent death was part of the normal reporting process and was not to blame for the incident. "The Journal doesn't "give" information over the phone," he wrote," it's supposed to get information, then sell it off the rack the next morning." True enough. Because someone from a newspaper (or web site) calls you up and says something significant has happened, doesn't make it so. As they say in the newsroom: "Check it out."
Ramsay, relatively new to the hot spotlight of major national breaking news, had her guard down. True, it's up to officials in power to check out the veracity of any statement before distributing that information to the public. But the mistake she made is one made by just about all of us who play this media game under the kleig lights. It hurts, but you learn from it.
Who knows where the rumor-spreading "official" got his information or why he felt compelled to share, but it sure caught some of this state's top media professionals in an uncomfortable snare, and alarmed the public and former colleagues of Skeen who learned of the event via our web site when it was picked up by the National Journal's "Hotline." We had dozens of visits from Capitol Hill and even from the Executive Office of the President, demonstrating the deep ties that Skeen, suffering from Parkinson's disease, still has to the highest levels of political power.
The Bottom Line: One Skeen confidante told me the event might have helped the ailing leader who is hospitalized in Roswell in critical condition: "If he heard about it I bet he was laughing his head off thinking of all the second-guessing that went on about him during his political career." Well, if it made Joe laugh, the good surely outweighed any real or imagined damage done.
For sure, the whole incident earned itself a prominent page in our never-ending book of La Politica.
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(c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2003
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