Voice of the Mid-Columbia | Kennewick, Pasco and Richland, Wash. |
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Chris Mulick has worked for the Herald since 1998 and has served as the statehouse correspondent covering state government and politics since 2000. He works year-round out of the Herald's Olympia bureau on the state Capitol campus. Have a question? Send Chris an e-mail and he'll answer the best questions regularly. |
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The Legislature is made up of a wide array of personalities but you’d never know it by reading their quotes in legislative press releases.
That’s because they all sound the same. Why? Because they're often written by a public information officer, not actually said by a legislator.
Color and personality is extracted, or at least greatly watered down, and what’s left are new versions of the same antiseptic quotes that appear repeatedly in other press releases. In the process blowhards can be made to look like statesmen and statesmen sometimes are left to look like, well, let’s just say really dry statesmen (if they're even issuing a press release at all).
So I took note last week when I got a lengthy missive from Sen. Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, about taxes and spending. And in there somewhere was this line.
“As someone who has heard many an agency official come before our Senate Ways and Means Committee to advocate for a budget appropriation, I know to ignore the sizzle and look through the smoke to see if there’s really a steak,” Schoesler said.
A line like that had to have been penned by the senator himself, right? I mean, his PIO couldn’t have conjured the ghost of (now former) Sen. Porch Dog Clements and taken such liberties with Schoesler's voice.
I wrote the PIO back to ask. And it turns out I reckoned wrong.
“It sounded like something he'd say,” the PIO turned quotemeister said of Schoesler.
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