Jim Madigan had the job I wanted last month: the dean of public TV in the Valley got to tell this year’s candidates for governor when to shut the hell up.
As moderator of the penultimate gubernatorial debate, held in Chicopee and sponsored by an ad hoc Western Mass. media consortium, Madigan even had to raise his voice a few times, sternly demanding immediate silence from whichever of the four candidates happened to be exceeding his or her allotted minute to answer a question from a panel of reporters. Remarkably, the politicians behaved themselves, even refrained from whining about rules that their respective campaigns had agreed to ahead of time.
The director of public affairs programming for WGBY-Channel 57, the public television station in Springfield, Madigan is about as polite and unflappable a journalist as you’ll find. His weekly show, The State We’re In, remains the gold standard for political discourse on TV in Western Massachusetts; it’s the Meet the Press of our state and region.
Madigan is widely admired by politicians as well as other journalists, regarded as fair, honest and kind. It’s one of the reasons he keeps the politicians, even the notorious ones, coming back to do his show.
I suspect that it was Madigan’s reputation as a well-informed, scrupulously fair journalist that kept gabby politicians like Deval Patrick and Charlie Baker from trying to filibuster at the Chicopee debate. The format also played a role in keeping the candidates focused. As a result, the Western Mass. debate was a great deal more substantive than any of the season’s other debates, and head and shoulders above the two highly publicized and closely watched debates sponsored by the Boston media consortium and moderated by big-name TV “journalists.”
In fact, comparing Madigan’s debate to the Boston-area gubernatorial debates moderated by CNN’s John King (Sept. 21) and former ABC anchor Charlie Gibson (the season’s final televised debate, held Oct. 25) is rather like comparing a trip to Africa to a trip to Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Sure, seeing Gibson chat with Patrick and Baker—he included Green/Rainbow candidate Jill Stein and Independent candidate Tim Cahill only reluctantly, eliciting a brief complaint from Stein that he simply ignored—was almost like watching a political debate. There were four candidates, but neither the format nor the hail-fellow-well-met Gibson did anything to force them to reveal more that you’d see in their ads or on their web sites.
To an even greater degree than CNN’s King had done a month earlier, Gibson insisted on taking as much news value and actual politics out of the proceedings as possible, asking the candidates, for example, to name something on which they’d recently “splurged” (I vomited a little when Baker said he’d spent $60 on dinner with his wife). He followed up that hardball by demanding to know what book each candidate was currently reading and what recent film they liked. (Turns out, all four candidates are utter duds when it comes to books, cinema and splurging.)
To see four Western Mass. reporters—Laura Hutchinson and Barry Krieger from WWLP, Fred Bever of WFCR-FM and Dan Ring from the Republican and MassLive.com.—actually grilling the candidates while Madigan played referee and timekeeper was to see a political debate as it should be, raised high above the irrelevant infotainment we get from the consortium in Boston (not to mention the crappy debates we see during presidential campaign years).
Of course, Madigan is far too classy a guy to brag about his own efforts or run down the other guy’s work. He told me that the format in Chicopee, which let reporters ask the questions and prevented candidates from engaging each other, was the result of negotiations between representatives from the four campaigns and representatives from the participating media, WGBY, WWLP-Channel 22 and the Springfield Republican. He said that putting together a debate is a tricky affair, requiring lots of cooperation between people and organizations that typically are competitors, not allies. Having gone through it in the Valley, Madigan said, “I can imagine it’s even harder in Boston, which is a big market where an hour’s worth of air time is worth a lot of money.”
What made the Chicopee debate stand out for Madigan? “I give a lot of the credit to the panelists. They came up with questions that were pointed, direct—good, probing, tough questions that pushed the candidates out of their comfort zone,” he said. In general, he added, “I have a journalist’s bias: I like to see people who do this for a living ask really finely honed questions. When you let candidates engage each other, the questions become speeches.”
Madigan also said he was glad no one asked anything like Gibson’s “splurge” question.”
