Speaking of Ed Case, I suppose I can share an experience of a couple of months ago. Late February, if I recall correctly without checking my calendar. I had gotten a call out of the blue from an acquaintance who was formerly a top administrator in a state agency which shall go unnamed. We met when I was a reporter and he was a pretty straight-shooting administrator. So now he invites me to lunch, unusual, reason unknown.

So we meet for lunch after one rescheduling. After the chit-chat, he lays out why he wanted to get together. He says that he has questions about how the media works, why some stories are pursued while others are left untouched or undeveloped, and that he sought me out because of my experience. He then expounded a theory about some stories being squelched through intervention by a political “machine” at the highest levels of the media.

At this point, he walked through four or five examples of stories which, he said, might have been subjects of such outside political manipulation. All but one involved Senator Dan Inouye, and all of those potentially cast the senator in a negative light.

I still didn’t catch on as I tried to explain why direct outside interference was most likely not the explanation for how these stories played out. At some point, he dropped in passing that he’s a personal friend of Ed Case, but the conversation went on in another direction and I kept waiting for the “real” question to be asked. It never happened. We finished lunch, shook hands, and it was over.

I was walking back towards town, replaying the conversation in my mind, when I realized he had not really been looking for an explanation of media decisions, but was either planting ideas for potential investigative stories about the senator, or perhaps just trolling for any indication of my feelings about candidate Case.

I have to admit that, at this point, I was quite disappointed by what I now perceive as an attempt to manipulate by dropping suggestions that others are engaged in manipulation. Since this is not someone who would normally have invited me to lunch, I have to conclude that this was planned and part of a larger strategy. It certainly appeared that it was a friend of Case targeting Senator Inouye and inviting negative reporting. Looking back, I wish the approach had been made directly instead of through what I have to interpret as subterfuge and manipulation.