Palmetto Pride

How could I let this week pass without acknowledging—nay, basking in—the pride I and many other South Carolinians have in our former governor, Mark Sanford, who set the example for good health and outdoor tourism with his penchant for walking the Appalachian Trail?

And now, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have immortalized Sanford in their text Blur as a cautionary tale—oops, I mean…example…of how interview subjects are booked for television news programs.

South Carolina State House.  Columbia, South Carolina.  1855.  
Greek Revival style.  National Register of Historic Places 
(June 5, 1970).  National Historic Landmark (May 11, 1976).  
Photographed by Stephen Milligan (June 21, 2010). 

Just as Sanford had jetted off to Argentina for a week to court his mistress, upon returning to his job as leader of the Palmetto State, he was immediately courted by television news outlets to come onto their programs to tell his tale of tortured love—mostly on his own terms or with promises of sympathetic interviewers, according to the e-mail messages Charleston’s newspaper, The Post and Courier, snagged through the Freedom of Information Act.

Talk about adding insult to injury!  It’s bad enough the man cheated on his wife, abandoned his job for a week, abandoned his four sons the week of Father’s Day, and lied about the whole mess (there’s that Palmetto Pride showing again), but then he has media franchises clamoring to have him as a guest so he can explain away the whole thing (wait, Palmetto Pride is an organization dedicated to fight litter in South Carolina…how appropriate—I’ll leave that reference in).

I remember Gov. Sanford’s 2009 walk well—I was in Springfield, Illinois, at the time, participating in a fellowship to study Abraham Lincoln for a week.  With only one teacher from each state, as the lone South Carolinian, I was the center of attention the morning the story broke.  A day or two later, the lady from Ohio even accused Sanford of having Michael Jackson killed to deflect attention from his escapades. 

Even more embarrassment—now South Carolina will forever be linked in some minds to the death of the King of Pop!

As a journalism teacher, there is something here to truly be proud of—the investigative reporting (see how I worked that other topic of discussion from this week in) of Gina Smith, The State newspaper reporter who drove four hours to Atlanta in the middle of the night to greet Sanford as he stepped off the airplane at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport that morning—to avoid the Columbia airport, of course.  Smith had gotten a tip that something other than a stroll on the Appalachian Trail was afoot, so she pursued the investigation—did a little digging, did a little raking—and hit pay dirt.

Those are the tools of any good investigative reporter—a shovel and a rake to uncover and sort through the muck politicians like Mark Sanford so plentifully supply their constituents.  If it hadn’t been for Smith’s persistence, Sanford’s dishonesty might have taken longer to be uncovered—or even have been obscured in the glare of his golden boy image.