Roads

Post leads content-free meter hike coverage

by David Alpert   •   April 15, 2010 11:58 am

The Washington Post just got four Pulitzers, but none of them came from attending a press conference and regurgitating the inflammatory statements by an interest group without doing any work to learn about the issue. Unfortunately, that's just what Tim Craig did to generate today's story exclusively AAA Mid-Atlantic's opinion on parking meter hikes.

Photo by Pierre-Olivier.

There's so much to the parking meter story. Why these particular meters? How crowded are those meters now, anyway? What will raising rates do? Does anyone benefit besides the DC budget? How does this tie in with pay-by-phone? Credit card meters? Multispace?

Sure, most reporters don't know a whole lot about parking policy. But that's why reporters talk to people who know more about the issue. Carol Buckley did that in yesterday's Current, not only explaining the changes but finding out that DDOT won't raise the rates on meters that drivers can only pay with coins.

Buckley also interviews parking experts in Montgomery County DOT, a Bethesda merchant, a representative of the Georgetown BID who thinks some rate increase does make sense, someone in Jim Graham's office, and Jack Evans about the overall budget context. Here's part 1 and part 2 of the article (PDF).

Nearly all other stories on the issue, however, take the much more superficial approach: budget increases fees, some people upset, controversy! And AAA is expert at playing into journalists' lazier tendencies. AAA calls a big press conference, Lon Anderson gives some incendiary quotes like, "Clearly, motorists are DC's new ATM," they feature a few local ANC commissioners who oppose the plan, and presto—instant article, no work required.

AAA gets away with this because they don't appear to be a lobbying interest group at first blush. They have a few million members from New Jersey to Virginia. However, very few of those members know about the group's lobbying efforts, and almost none joined because of it. They're an emergency service towing agency that runs a substantial lobbying effort on the side. When Intuit, a financial services technology firm, lobbies on tax preparation laws, Post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro rightly calls out the practice; when the local towing organization lobbies, they get their talking points in print.

I don't necessarily expect big policy depth from the NBCWashington blog and Examiner blogs, but the Washington Post likes to hold itself to a higher standard.

Most of the time the Post actually achieves that, with generally well-researched stories particularly from Ashley Halsey, Bob Thomson, Bob McCartney, and Lena Sun before she left the transit beat. Many reporters at smaller publications such as Mike DeBonis and the new Lydia DePillis at the City Paper, Michael Neibauer now at the Business Journal, Kytja Weir at the Examiner, and much of the staff of the Current do meaningful reporting work on local issues. It's not always perfect, but on balance, it illuminates the important local issues.

That's why it's particularly frustrating that the Post maintains this highway-sized blind spot for AAA. For some reason, no matter what they do, if AAA opens its mouth, they get a big fat and unquestioning story in the Post. That needs to stop.

I don't even agree with the parking meter rate hike as proposed. But it's not fair to say motorists are DC's new ATM, either. In this budget, everyone is an ATM: people who have phone lines, car sharing companies, construction companies that need steel plates, hospitals, professionals who apply for licenses, and almost anyone else that needs a government service.

It's fair to debate whether these fees are good policy; it's irresponsible to say it's a "war" against the poor, downtrodden driver, who can still park for less than Metro fare. And it's even more irresponsible for a national-stature paper to reprint that stuff blindly, time and again.

Here's an idea. If AAA wants to put its arguments in the Post verbatim, it should take out an ad. That would also help improve the Post's shaky finances. If they don't do that, the Post should start actually reporting on their issues instead.

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.