Defining good governance and the bias of the middle

Today's Post editorializes about the process of the special real estate deal in the West End, in "A Rush to Action." One line calls out to me:

Mr. Fenty, as well as the city he represents, is ill-served when good governance is compromised in the rush to achieve an end.

There is an organization called FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which I suppose the right would charge with having a "left" bias. In the mid 1990s I read a speech by the then director, and he made the point that for the most part, media in the United States support the government in power, have an overall "bias towards the middle" in terms of policy issues, and explain away problems exposed as one time aberrations which are now corrected and won't occur in the future (cf. Vietnam War vs. Iraq War in terms of thinking about organizational learning).

Reading the Post pretty closely for about 20 years and having a decent memory, I am ever more more interested in the structures and systems of government, nonprofit organizations, and business. To me, the Post focuses on the moment, not whether or not the overall processes, systems, and structures are in place to yield high quality outcomes.

Given that the Post is the major newspaper in the nation's capital, where the business of the city is government first and foremost, this is a damning and damnable failure of its own internal processes.

If you have a basic "bias" that outcomes should show equity, fairness, participation, long term value, and quality, and if that isn't the most common result, then you should question the process and the systems that undergird it.

The Who said it a long time ago... "Meet the new boss. Same as the Old Boss."

If it's about the Boss, not about democracy, then we all lose.

Local media is part of the Growth Machine, but is stuck in a boundary spanning role because the "fourth estate" also represents the people.

These kinds of dilemmas make good story fodder for the Columbia Journalism Review and the American Journalism Review. But the implications are more broad.

From Tensions in the Growth Machine: Overcoming Resistance to Value-Free Development, Molotch and Logan, Social Problems (1984):

Local elites with practical interest in the use of land and buildings, such as developers, landlords, and savings and loans officials, build their own fortunes by managing urban governments and cultural institutions and promoting urban growth. In each locality, coalitions of these modern day "rentiers" prepare the ground for capital, preparing it for the widest possible choice of sites under profitable conditions..., Local media, so critical to growth coalitions, have been absorbed...