THE DEAD ZONE

Yesterday evening the four Grand Rapids mayoral candidates appeared at the Wealthy Street Theater for a 90-minute question-and-answer session hosted by the Neighborhood Business Alliance.  It was an informative presentation of the candidates' views, and we'll have our commentary on it in an upcoming article.  However, don't expect much from the local media if you want to know what the candidates are promising.

The mayoral race is a dead zone in local media coverage.  We've noted that previously regarding last week's public call-in to quiz the candidates.  The t.v. news reportage was, if not non-existent, abysmal, and though the Grand Rapids Press did cover the call-in, you learned nothing much about the candidates' views from their story.  So far, the N.B.A.'s Q&A with the candidates isn't getting any better notice from the local media.

Last night, your Executive Director and Editor checked out Fox17 News instead of WOOD TV8 to see what the t.v. news would have to say about the Q&A.  We figured that with an hour-long local news show, Fox would have the time to report on a mayoral debate seeing that the primary election is only a week and a half away.  As it happened, Fox had time to plug as news the Fox conglomerate's entertainment products, including the premiere of The Simpsons Movie and the late-breaking flash that the new season of the t.v. show 24 will be set in D.C. rather than L.A.

But not a word about how mayoral candidates Jim Rinck, Jackie Miller, Rick Tormala, and George Heartwell want to run* Grand Rapids for the next four years.

(* Yes, we at LAW know that so long as the City Commission is supine before the apparatchiks of the city staff, no mayor actually runs G.R.  Perhaps challenging the regime of City Manager Kurt Kimball would make a good campaign issue for the local media to raise ... oh, that's right, that would mean the local media would have to actually cover the campaign.)