Strong media skills often sit high atop the list of why a political candidate succeeds. I was reminded of that watching Governor-Elect Scott Walker’s masterful performance as guest speaker at a Milwaukee Press Club luncheon this week.

The room was packed, sold out, with every media organization in town crammed in the tiny space, with a panel of three solid journalists and a sharp audience pitching him questions.

Yet in the face of this media scrum, Walker exhibited preparation, confidence, a human touch, a plan to make news, non-defensiveness about the questions and clear, repeated but natural delivery of messages.

Later, I had no problem recalling his two key messages. First, he said he’ll solve the budget deficit while pursuing all options – except by raising taxes. Second, his priorities once in office will be helping Wisconsin companies create jobs and trying to attract companies outside the state to Wisconsin to create jobs. He also made it clear by repetition what the news story would be from the event – that state union workers were going to help solve the budget crisis by some sort of cutbacks.

Whether you agree with his positions or not, he got them across to the media, and the public.

During the event, I didn’t see what some new to power (or in this case, higher office) often show the media once they get there – hubris, arrogance, ego, annoyance, impatience, prickliness, unpreparedness, anger. Such attitudes turn media against you.

Scott Walker just won a campaign by a reasonable margin, yet a few weeks later, he’s acting as if he’s still campaigning, at least with his media discipline. Whether he’s focused on media at all times, or whether he actually is campaigning for higher office, I can’t say.

While over the years, I’ve seen Walker speak and talked with him, I’d never observed him in a media event before this one. So after the luncheon, I checked with one of the panelists, ace Journal Sentinel reporter Lee Bergquist, a former colleague at the Milwaukee Sentinel, to see if my instincts were right about Walker being so good with media. Berquist, who covered the recent gubernatorial election, said they were.

“He’s a master communicator,” Bergquist answered, without hesitation.

“He’s very good at communicating. He’s great to work with, even in an adversarial relationship, between a reporter and a politician, because he knows what you need.”

Bergquist agreed that Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Walker’s gubernatorial opponent, also was effective with media. “Walker just really excels,” Bergquist said.

Bergquist reminded me of a Q&A he conducted with Walker during the campaign that shows Walker’s interest in communications:

Q. If you weren’t in politics, what would you like to do?

A. Ride my Harley all day. My wife and I have talked about it and I don’t know what I would do. Maybe something in communications. Maybe I would host a radio or TV show.

Walker’s media skills didn’t make or break the election, but they sure didn’t hurt. It’s too soon to say how his skills will serve him as governor, when he’ll face more media pressure than ever, but I wouldn’t bet against them.

Epilogue…

In 2012, two years after I wrote the above blog post, I had the opportunity to write an article for Delta airline’s “Sky” magazine on Wisconsin’s economy. Gov. Walker was among the many people I interviewed. Seeing him as a reporter for the first time, I agree with Lee Bergquist’s assessment above. Walker was one of the best interviews I conducted for the story if not the best. When we spoke on the phone, he was friendly, engaged, prepared and very quotable. Made my job easy.

You might have heard, air travelers upset with new TSA body scanners were waging an “Internet campaign” for an “opt out” protest that would cause havoc at airports during the busy Thanksgiving weekend.

When I said “might” have heard, I meant – “you couldn’t avoid this story.” As CNN’s “Reliable Sources” host Howard Kurtz said on his show this week, “Every hour that I turn on cable news, I see this story, even if nothing new has happened in the past 24 or 48 hours…Does it deserve to be on television every hour, and then repeatedly lead the network evening news and the network morning shows?”

Bruce Plante, Tulsa World

Why the insatiable media appetite for this story?

Columnist David Carr in The New York Times this week offered a list of reasons that media couldn’t resist this story: timing, execution, mystery, mistrust of government, relevance, nothing and everything, displacement, race and class, good visuals and gender. His column deserves a read as a reminder of what makes media tick sometimes.

Speaking on “Reliable Sources,” GQ columnist Ana Marie Cox put her finger more simply on the cause – it’s us. Answering Kurtz’s rhetorical question about whether Matt Drudge of the influential www.drudgereport.com had become “America’s assignment editor,” Cox said that in essence Drudge was giving us what we wanted:

Drudge is less America’s assignment editor than he is America’s id…He can plug into those exact fears and insecurities that people have, and then that’s what gets the (Internet) traffic, that’s what then gets these guys working on it.”

After all the media build up, why did this hyped Internet protest simply fizzle? Author Malcolm Gladwell, in a piece published before the airport campaign was announced called “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” explained what he sees as limitations of Internet organizing.

Gladwell wrote that social media wouldn’t have been enough for Martin Luther King in his battle against segregation in the South.

The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

Gladwell makes a lot of good points. Is that why the protest failed, despite media and viewers gorging on the story? What do you think?

[On a side note of local musical interest, GQ columnist Cox, quoted above, recently wrote about a great Milwaukee band, Sat. Nite Duets. She linked to Milwaukee music blogger extraordinaire Ryan Matteson’s post on the band.]

Think print is dead? It’s not healthy, but you can’t play taps for it just yet. Consider this: A former counterculture mag that’s evolved and is still kicking, Rolling Stone magazine, just caused the “resignation” and retirement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

What killed McChrystal’s career wasn’t actually Rolling Stone’s newsprint and ink. It was the general’s mouth – and his lack of understanding of media.

Like many a source, McChrystal grew a bit too comfortable with reporters around him (see New York Times’ Gail Collins funny column) and began to believe that they wouldn’t report his every word. As discussed on NPR’s “On The Media” this week, beat reporters typically don’t write everything they see and hear.

As a Milwaukee Sentinel reporter, I developed sources by looking the other way at times. I once wrote about a law enforcement unit conducting a planned drug raid after riding along with the officers. Before the raid, the officers, all plainclothes, met at a bar with me in tow. And they had a drink or two. While on duty. Just a few hours later, they raided a drug house, and ended up drawing weapons to save the life of an undercover officer inside.

Did I write the drinking part of the story? No. Did that help me win their trust in the future? Yes. That said, if the bust had gone bad, maybe I would have written about the drinking. Or if one of them had been in a DWI accident. Was it smart for them to take me to the bar and watch them drink on duty before an armed raid?

I recall being with an elected official I worked for who surprised me by telling a trusted reporter we ran into something, off-the-record, that was very juicy. Off-the-record. Well, not long after, another reporter, a friend of the first reporter, called me, saying she had heard from “a source” that this elected official had said such and such. Guess what? This second reporter wrote the story. It was a huge story. And the elected official had a big headache of a problem that lasted for months.

What McChrystal and others sometimes forget is that reporters have a job to do. Put something juicy in front of them, their job will be to try to get it into the media. Maybe not every time. But you never know.

Another interesting aspect of the Rolling Stone story is that the magazine initially gave excerpts of its story exclusively to AP and didn’t post the story online until the next day. This drove interest in their print edition. As columnist David Carr wrote today, it also drove Time magazine and the website Politico to run PDFs of the print story on their websites – until Rolling Stone demanded their removal.

So, reporting isn’t dead, and neither is print – not within the last few days, anyway.