Used to be even the most hapless of presidential candidates could count on their home-town newspaper covering their otherwise-ignored efforts. But according to Politico’s Dylan Byers, Linc Chafee’s home-town paper–the Providence Journal–is refusing to send any staff to follow him around the campaign trail. Yes, they’re publishing brief AP stories on things like his announcement of candidacy. But their own efforts have been limited to an editorial denouncing him as an embarrassment to the state.
Byers goes on to tell us that a former ProJo reporter is saying this attitude is the product of a vendetta going back to Chafee’s support for a sales tax on newspapers. But whatever its origins, you’d think he’d go to some effort to patch it all up.
Politics, of course, is full of media-bashers, and I suppose Chafee could puzzle Democratic activists in Iowa or New Hampshire by shouting at that “lying Providence newspaper.” It might even make the ProJo via the kind of tiny AP story Chafee is likely to get.
