If you followed the D&C’s coverage of the stem cell debate last week (none of which is available for free now, so I can’t link to it), you’ll notice that the Editorial page was all over the issue. There were, by my count, at least three editorial pieces in favor of it, including one by the editorial board itself. Why then, was there was no coverage of how our representatives voted on the issue? As far as I can tell, there has not been a single mention of how any of Monroe County’s four Congressional representatives voted on it (for the record, Slaughter voted for it, while Kuhl, Reynolds, and Walsh voted against it).

The D&C editorial board (to its credit) clearly sees stem cell research as an important issue, locally as well as nationally (one of the pieces on the editorial page was by University of Rochester president Joel Seligman). If it is an important local issue, the votes of our local representatives are important. Yes, we all know the Op-Ed and news divisions are separate entities, but I seriously doubt that the news division views this issue as unimportant. In fact, the D&C did devote a reasonable amount of coverage to Bush’s veto of the bill — it was only local Congressmen’s votes that were given short shrift.

I see this as part of a larger pattern: the votes of local Congressman are simply not given the scrutiny they deserve by local media. It’s not just the D&C — the Syracuse Post-Standard’s coverage of the stem cell debate was worse, for example. At some level, I understand it — the idea that people like Randy Kuhl and James Walsh are making important decisions about the area’s future is terrifying. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

The federal government has a 2.6 trillion dollar annual budget right now. If you break that down into 435 districts, that’s over five and a half billion dollars per district. So among the four representatives in Monroe County, that makes for a total of over 22 billion dollars. That’s larger than the total revenues of Xerox or Kodak.

Nobody wants to think about Randy Kuhl or James Walsh overseeing 5.5 billion dollars a year in local money. But until we admit that their votes in Congress are important, we’re going to keep electing people who are too stupid or too craven to use these vote wisely.

Related posts:

1. one man protest gets major local coverage
2. Local blog round-up, Part II
3. Kuhl on lack of Local Coverage
4. Another loyalty test coming for Kuhl/Walsh/Reynolds
5. Local Congressmen votes on the Bailout Bill