Political Desk

This week’s story about the Weidner-Bunn thing has hit the blogosphere: Over on NW Republican, there’s a discussion unfolding in which a couple of inaccuracies have popped up.

Blog host Coyote says that Bunn’s response to the “alert” that Weidner’s supporters sent out over the weekend was that “he took umbrage that Jim Weidner’s name wasn’t one of the signatories on the letter.”

That’s not exactly true.

I interviewed Bunn briefly about the mailer, and while he obviously was critical of the letter, I don’t recall him making any reference to or expressing an opinion about the fact that Weidner did not sign it. What he did say was that it was difficult at first to determine who was responsible for sending it: Something along the lines of “Paid for by Friends of Jim Weidner,” or whatever. I reported the fact that the candidate himself was not one of the signatories. It seemed like a relevant point, given that the return address was the post office box for Weidner’s campaign.

Then, someone called “CommonSense” follows with the declaration that: “It was the News-Register who sought Bunn out, not the other way around.” How does he know this? “I know,” he says.

That is inaccurate. I learned about the mailer because Jim Bunn called me Monday afternoon and told me about it. The reason he knew about it was that members of his own family had received it.

Does this constitute “planting” the story, as CommonSense suggests? That seems unnecessarily conspiratorial. Reporters talk to sources, and sources talk to reporters. I suppose if I arrived at work and found a copy of the letter in a brown paper bag on my desk with no note, we could talk about “planting” stories. And actually, I’ve had campaigns where a candidate who felt slighted called and asked for a story; that wasn’t the case here. Bunn brought it to my attention, made the comment that appears in print, and left it at that.

Frankly, I don’t regard the question of how the News-Register learned about it as particularly important. You cannot do a mass mailing to voters, or even some of them, in a hot primary race and expect to keep it a secret. If Bunn hadn’t called me, someone else surely would have, and then I would have called him for his comment.