Statehouse beat: Short attention span of news cycle is a disservice

Take the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump. More than a year after the incident in Butler, Pennsylvania, we still know precious little about just what happened.

The would-be assassin, Thomas Crooks, remains a cipher. We still know little about his background or his motive. As far as I can ascertain, no one has interviewed his parents.

We have yet to learn any details about the extent of Trump’s injury or medical care.

We still lack information on why perimeter security was so lax, or why Secret Service agents broke protocol, allowing Trump to stand and pump his fist, at a point when it was unclear whether Crooks had an accomplice.

Contrast that lack of news coverage with coverage of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

News media extensively covered the incident, Reagan’s emergency surgery, medical care and recovery. Indeed, the media was able to report such specific details as Reagan telling his surgical team, “I hope you are all Republicans.�

The media also reported in detail on others wounded in the attempt, including press secretary James Brady, who was left permanently disabled. For years after, media reported on Brady’s recovery and on his becoming a leading advocate for gun control.

As opposed to being a cipher, the media provided myriad details about would-be assassin John Hinckley, including his bizarre obsession with actress Jodi Foster, which led him to stage the shooting in a demented attempt to impress her.

Granted, Reagan was a sitting president, not a presidential candidate, and his assailant was captured, not killed. However, the thoroughness of the coverage of that incident is striking, compared to the paucity of information about the Trump assassination attempt.

And it is not an isolated case of the media both not having access to important information and not following up on news events.

For example, the assassination of a Minnesota legislator and her spouse, and the attempted assassination of a second Minnesota legislator and his spouse — allegedly by a man who had a hit list consisting exclusively of Democrats — disappeared from the news cycle seemingly in a matter of days.

Part of that is a result of the chaos that is the Trump administration, where each day brings a new controversy or affront, resulting in the media jumping from issue to issue without sustained coverage of any one outrage.

Perhaps the best current example of that are the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump campaigned on releasing the files. But in a matter of days, the files went from sitting on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s desk awaiting imminent release, to suddenly not existing at all, then returning to existence, but supposedly in the form of a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats. The only difference between this and other Trumpian fabrications and distortions is that the MAGA faithful aren’t buying it.

Meanwhile, the media bounces from the opening of a detention facility in the Everglades, to a Supreme Court ruling allowing the unconstitutional dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, to an order to spend $130,000 to incinerate 500 tons of expiring high-energy biscuits that could feed hungry children, never providing the time for any one of the outrages to fully register with the American public.

Additionally, media outlets today operate with considerably fewer personnel.

When Chilton was publisher of the Gazette, he oversaw a newsroom that had five times as many reporters as the current Gazette-Mail. Sustaining outrage was much easier when reporters weren’t also under constant pressure to feed the beast that is the daily news cycle, and often had the luxury of spending days or even weeks working on a single project.

While a news media that is diminished from what it was in the 1980s may be one reason why the American public is less informed today, the reality is that the last thing the party in power in Washington and ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä wants is an informed electorate. As I alluded to last week, they don’t want to know the truth, and they particularly don’t want the people to know.

Thus, they are less transparent, and are not only less cooperative with the news media, but frequently are openly antagonistic.

It’s clearly a reason why Congressional Republicans voted to defund the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. The less access to information the public has, the better.

Unfortunately, the result is an American public that, despite the around-the-clock availability of mass and social media, is not nearly as well informed as it was 40 years ago.

That every detail of the Reagan assassination attempt of 1981 came to light is the result of both a more aggressive press corps, and a comparatively transparent administration that cooperated to make that information available to the media.

The reason we’ve learned precious little about the Trump assassination attempt of 2024 is due, in large part, to the Trump administration not wanting us to know.

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Evidently, Trump isn’t the only member of the majority party who believes his constituents are gullible, ill-informed or just plain dumb.

Last week, I referenced the case of Delegate Ian T. Masters, R-Berkeley, who claimed he must have been hacked after an antisemitic remark appeared in one of his social media posts.

With House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, unmoved by calls for a formal investigation, House Majority Leader Pat McGeehan, R-Hancock, took it upon himself to conduct a one-man investigation in which he reached the ludicrous conclusion that the antisemitic slur was the work of a homeless man to whom Masters had given an old cellphone.

After all, who among us hasn’t had occasion to give an old cellphone to a homeless stranger without bothering to delete any apps or passwords?

As reported by West Virginia Watch, McGeehan refused to identify the purported homeless man, or provide any other evidence to support his preposterous story.

That incident was quickly followed by the release of an electronic letter to the state’s congressional delegation seemingly from Delegate Charles Sheedy Sr., R-Marshall, decrying FEMA’s failure to issue disaster declarations for Ohio and Marion counties following devastating flooding on June 14 that killed nine people.

The Gazette-Mail’s Mike Tony did his usual excellent reporting in finding that nationally, both the time lag for FEMA to issue disaster declarations, and the percentage of requests denied have increased significantly since Trump took office Jan. 20, which Tony attributed in part to the layoffs of some 200 agency employees.

Certainly, there’s nothing unusual about a legislator writing members of the state congressional delegation to ask if they could hasten the issuing of disaster relief to his constituents.

The letter went on to note that 76% of those constituents voted for Trump in 2024, and stated, “It is very apparent that the president does not need West Virginia now that he is in office for one term.�

The letter also raised the seemingly reasonable concern that the failure to provide timely flood relief could result in Republicans losing seats in the 2026 midterm elections. However, once the letter went public, Sheedy took the Trumpian route, effectively declaring it to be a hoax, saying he had not written it, and that his legislative account must have been hacked.

Never mind that, again as reported by West Virginia Watch, officials with the Legislative Automated Systems Division found no evidence of suspicious activity involving Sheedy’s accounts.

A more plausible explanation is that once the letter became public, Sheedy remembered that even mild criticism of Dear Leader is forbidden, and felt compelled to deny everything.

Again, like McGeehan’s homeless hacker theory, the idea that someone would not only go to the lengths of hacking Sheedy’s account, but would author and distribute a lengthy letter in his name more than strains credulity.

Meanwhile, in an interview on MetroNews, state Treasurer Larry Pack defended exponential future growth in the costs of the Hope Scholarship program — the scheme that uses taxpayer dollars to help pay private and parochial school tuition, and homeschooling expenses — on the grounds that growth in state revenue collections will be more than sufficient to cover those soaring costs.

“Our budget revenue goes up every year, because our taxpayers are working hard and paying more taxes every year,� Pack claimed.

However, as readers of last week’s column know, that simply is not true. State revenue collections have declined each of the past two fiscal years to the tune of more than $1 billion.

Pack’s statement is either evidence that he is staggeringly unqualified to be the state’s chief financial officer, or the statement is an outright fabrication.

Perhaps it’s easy to understand why these majority party members believe their constituents are gullible enough to believe such ridiculous claims. After all, those same constituents keep electing them over and over again.