Mike Huckabee, by Mike Huckabee
As tipped, again, by the scoop of the Arkansas Times blog, I inquired as to whether it's true that the Little Rock paper Sunday will run on its editorial section front a personal piece from Mike Huckabee defending himself on the emergency fund/hard drive crushing, and that it would do so despite newsroom objections to the very idea that Huckabee would decline to talk to the newspaper's reporters but avail himself of another wing of the newsroom to mount his story without standard reportorial inquiry. I was told that Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor, could answer. Greenberg said he simply couldn't because the readers deserved the information first. When I asked him if we could talk Sunday or Monday to seek his explanation for what he did, he said sure. May I say that this is not a hard journalistic question, despite reports of internal dispute and angst over at the LR paper. What you do is tell Huckabee you will be happy to run his piece as written in the editorial section, but that you will insist on sharing it with the newsroom for development as a straight news article, also for Sunday, and that if Huckabee declines to cooperate with reporters, then, well, you simply will be unable to provide him an immunized forum. Or, if you don't want to coordinate editorial with news that way, then you could insist that one of the editorial writers — the soon-to-depart Kane Webb, perhaps — be allowed to question Huckabee beyond what he's written and write a little sidebar for the editorial section fleshing out or balancing the governor's unfiltered account. Maybe that's what they're doing. We can hope.