On her namesake MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow has been showing an intense interest in investigating the strange turns of Michigan politics -- and calling for much more national attention to what she sees as a the rapidly accelerating diminishment of voting rights, stretching from the emergency manager law Gov. Rick Snyder signed last year to ... well, some legislative customs that raised her eyebrows and incited a 16-minute segment last week that served as the first in a series. I wrote about the story behind the story for the Columbia Journalism Review (who were nice enough to feature it as the lead article on the homepage), after speaking with a host of folks: Democratic legislators who are suing the GOP, the Republican press secretary for the Speaker of the House, reporters in the Statehouse press corps, and Maddow's own producers.
A big story is unfolding here in Michigan, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week professed to have the “scoop”—but she has gotten plenty of pushback for how she presented it, from Republican lawmakers, liberal bloggers, and folks in-between. In exploring that dissent and tracing the anatomy of the “scoop,” I’ve seen that many of the criticisms were valid: Maddow and her team botched the story in important ways, and that mishandling made it easy for detractors to dismiss her claims outright.
At the same time, she was on to something—and her attention to the story highlights the different approaches of national and local media, and the importance of both insider and outsider eyes on state government.
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