Legal Commentary

Yesterday's News Tomorrow (Literally)

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Today’s Washington Post web site has a story with tomorrows date, one that appears in tomorrow’s paper, about Obama’s attempts to woo the Latino vote in California. The tenor of the story, written by two reporters, is that it’s an uphill slog and things aren’t going well (it concludes by quoting an observer as describing Obama’s outreach campaign as “a little bit too late and not enough”).

Don’t these guys read even major blogs? Over at Daily Kos they’ve had this item since 2:08 pm DC time: Obama’s Piolín boost:

this is gold for Obama, with Ted Kennedy getting royal treatment on the El Piolín radio show today. This is significant for several major reasons. Hillary is leading Obama in southern California in huge part because of the Latino vote — helped in large part by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s support and machine. Big city mayors are some of the best endorsements a candidate can get because they have a patronage machine they can activate on behalf of candidates they support. Yet down in southern California, El Pioín owns the market and is the largest radio show in the country. Yup, that’s bigger than you-know-who.

Maids get out of bed and slip on their uniforms, landscapers load leaf blowers into rusty flatbed trucks before chugging up the freeway and cooks turn on restaurant stoves to make flapjacks. They, like other listeners, know [Eduardo] Sotelo as El Piolin, or Tweety Bird, and they regard him as a Mexican immigrant hero, someone like them, a role model. Twenty years ago, Sotelo sneaked across the Mexican border into California by hiding in the trunk of a car, and now his Spanish-language radio show, “El Piolin por la Mañana,” has made him a rags-to-riches story, a DJ who beats Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh and Tom Joyner every weekday morning, according to Arbitron ratings.

Remember the big immigration protests last year? This was the guy who fueled them nationwide. So he’s not just a fun D.J., he can move people. And to this crowd, Sen. Ted Kennedy is a HUGE hero — the man who has been fighting to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate.

And today, his show was one big love note to Obama, featuring none other than Kennedy.

Maybe this isn’t quite as big a deal as the blogger would have it. But you’d think it was worth a mention somewhere in a long article on the subject, wouldn’t you?

Read the Post article carefully and it seems that many of the quotes were gathered earlier in the week. This ties into an increasingly common phenomenon for me: stuff I read online is either better than, or two or three days ahead of, what I read in the papers. (The papers are still best for big investigative stuff, and for routine coverage of setpiece government, like Congressional hearings. But they are surprisingly poor these days at anything complex, including Senate parliamentary procedure.)

I don’t know what the deadlines are at the print Washington Post, but more and more I have to think that Brad’s right: the print media are digging their own grave.

I’ll miss them.

Won’t I?

[Update: actually, by the time I posted this, it was “tomorrow” already, so I should have said, “Yesterday, the Washington post web site had a story with today’s date…” But the story had been up for a while.]

Full post as published by Discourse.net on February 01, 2008 (boomark / email).