When a Non-Story is Used for Political Purposes

There was a story in the El Paso Times over the weekend that I couldn't figure out how it made it to print.

The story was written by Diana Washington-Valdez and I attempted to reach her for comment but she did not return my email. I'll get to that part in a bit.

Word on the street is that Al Weisenberger allegedly pitched a story about an alleged campaign finance violation by his opponent in the District 1 run-off Peter Svarzbein to Washington-Valdez.

Washington-Valdez called me not so long ago trying to fish for a quote to build a story around. There was no story, but she really wanted to see if I'd give her something to write about. Nice try, I'm not stupid. I have the emails and I'll post them if necessary to prove my point. It irritated me because that's bush league shit and she was freaking rude. I don't play that shit. Reporters don't scare me. 

Anywho, Washington-Valdez did this story and it was focused on the candidates allegedly trading accusations about wrong-doing in their finance reports. 

At first I was a little surprised that Weisenberger would want to make a thing about finance reports considering how incredibly inept he appears to be about filing pretty simple documents. Seriously, the number of mistakes he has made in his finance reporting has reached punchline level status.

Underscore that with the fact that he's an attorney and it makes his blunders look even worse. But then I realized why he pitched the story. And frankly it makes a lot of sense. He and his boys from Forma know that in a run-off you go balls to the wall. So it makes sense to try to pitch a negative story, find a nice bad quote from the story and slap it on a piece of mail and use the fact that it was in the El Paso Times to add credibility to the negative statement.

David K has been all over this since day one. That's been his main negative push against Svarzbein. After reading Washington-Valdez's piece I read a lot of innuendo and allegations. But it was missing something that was never really stated in the article other than alluded to in a quote from Svarzbein.

What I didn't see in the article about alleged ethical violations was whether or not there was actually a violation alleged with the Texas Ethics Commission. 

Here's her paragraph I'm speaking about:

....sooooo....was there actually a complaint filed about the allegations from Weisenberger? Because if there wasn't, what is the story?

Whenever someone pitches me something I always ask myself what's their angle? What is in it for them? Because people don't do stuff for no reason. So I'd ask myself, why is this guy pitching me a story about an alleged ethics violation without telling me if he filed a complaint? And if he didn't file a complaint, why wouldn't he if he was an attorney and felt so strongly about it? 

So I actually called the Ethics Commission to find out. They said that they could neither confirm, nor deny whether an allegation has been filed to anyone other than the party. So I checked with the Svarzbein campaign and no complaint has been filed.

So where is the story?

Blogworthy? Sure.

Printed story in the newspaper of record?

You decide.

Again, I emailed Washington-Valdez to ask her if she actually attempted to reach the Ethics Commission to find out if a violation was alleged and she has not responded. But hey, I don't blame her for ignoring me, I'm just a blogger.

When I spoke to the Ethics commission and gave them the scenario of the alleged violation they indicated that it didn't sound like there was a violation but they only agreed to speak in very general terms and wouldn't get into specifics.