Today’s politics deep dive is about how I’d been having trouble getting anybody from the Spanberger administration to get back to me, which, given what I was asking about, felt kinda funky to me.
The issue is resolved now, but it still feels … kinda funky.
How this recent thing for me started: I’d emailed the governor’s press office on Jan. 27 regarding a matter involving the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents, and then again on Jan. 30 about the status of the former Augusta Correctional Center property – no response to either.
Not, “no comment, thanks for the opportunity to respond.”
Just, no response.
It didn’t hit me until the weekend that this was the case; I had decided to hold off on writing about the issue at the CCCA until I got a response, and then other news items worked their way to the front of the line; and the silence on the prison property issue didn’t hinder me from writing as much as it bothered me that I wasn’t even given the “no comment.”
I meant to press the issue on Monday, but again, other news items jumped the line; on Tuesday, I finally got around to emailing the governor’s press office to ask what was going on, and after not getting anything back, sent a second email a little later from another email address, to try to account for the possibility that the emails from my main account were maybe ending up in a spam folder.
No responses to either of those.
Now I’m getting a little, you know, lathered, so, I reached out to a friend who works in the Virginia political media, who told me he was having a similar issue, and then pointed me to a tweet from another journo, Brandon Jarvis.
My thought at this point: what in the sam heck is going on here?
So, on Wednesday, still with nothing back in the inbox from the Spanberger folks, I sent this email to the press team:
No response to my emails about not getting any response from you guys.
And then I see that the same game is apparently being played with Brandon Jarvis.
Now I’m writing about this, so I’ll make this request for comment:
Why is the Spanberger press team ignoring certain local Virginia media?
I obviously don’t expect a reply, but one is certainly welcome.
This one got a response.
Funny how things work there.
Technical issues?
Long and short of it, the contact who reached out to me from the Spanberger press office told me over the phone that the reason for the botches in communication is technical issues.
The person who talked me through things came across as sincere, if not a tad bit overwhelmed, so, I can buy it.
It’s not like, especially today, that I wouldn’t get the concept of technical issues – we’re having some pretty big ones here at AFP in the here and now, trying to get our site onto a new server; if you can imagine, our news site, which dates back to 2002, and has more than 115,000 published articles spanning the two decades, is massive.
Let’s just say, moving it from one web server to another is going to be a bit more of an undertaking than we’d assumed, and we’d assumed going in that it would be a herculean job.
ICYMI
OK, so, yes, technical issues, per the governor’s office, which sounded, as they were being explained to me, more like user error, but from experience, technical issues almost universally are user error, and not actually technical.
It is funny to me that, to get this resolved, it took me sending a request for comment, not about the CCCA or the former prison property, but for a story about why the governor’s press team seemed to be ignoring certain local Virginia media.
It’s almost like, that Brandon Jarvis tweet was bad enough; we don’t want Chris Graham going nuclear.
I will note here that Jarvis tweeted out a response from the Spanberger administration today on a story on congressional redistricting, so, seems that the technical issue that he’d apparently been experiencing resolved itself as well.
I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Maybe something else going on here
This is an ICYMI: from a column that I wrote back in September:
Our requests for one-on-one interviews with Abigail Spanberger, with Ghazala Hashmi, with Jay Jones, actually get replies like this one:
“We are currently working to help plan Sen. Hashmi’s schedule for the weeks and months ahead and will follow up with an update as soon as we can on whether we can fit this in the schedule.”
That email exchange is dated Aug. 8, so, a month ago, almost, at this writing – we’d also reached out to the other statewide Democratic Party nominees at the same time.
Same basic message.
They’re all seeing if they can fit us into the schedule.
I’m not holding my breath.
ICYMI
Update: you might have noticed that we didn’t get any one-on-one time with any of the three statewide Dem candidates, which, fine, I get it.
I’m just a rube out in the sticks; I’m not somebody from the Washington Post, from CNN or MS Now; I’m sure as hell not Stephen Colbert.
ICYMI
I understand the governor flying to New York to get the rub from Colbert; and that 20 minutes on Zoom with me doesn’t produce enough juice to justify the squeeze.
“Fringe media,” I believe, is how we’re viewed here at AFP, based on one jab made at me in print by a sportswriter who’d been tasked with debunking my reporting on UVA Basketball coach Tony Bennett being near retirement that turned out to be true.
Controlling the message
As far as Democrats are concerned, I’m a fellow traveler, but not exactly a water-carrier – for instance, we called for Ralph Northam to step down as governor in 2019 at the outset of the Blackface scandal, and wrote several follow-ups noting the hypocrisy of Democrats who joined us in doing so at the beginning of the scandal, then exercised their right to remain silent when he didn’t, and the controversy eventually blew over.
I was just as vocal about Jay Jones needing to step aside when the Todd Gilbert texts emerged in the latter stages of the 2025 campaign; feels like we’re due the first of several follow-ups there, with Jones in office, and everybody having moved on as if Jones winning in November washed the sins of those awful, awful texts away.
If doing those kinds of things, and calling out Mark Warner and Tim Kaine as Vichy Democrats for their early complicity with the worst excesses of the Trump agenda, means I don’t get access, so be it.
Ditto for my regular readings of the riot act toward Democrats in Richmond and DC for barely even paying lip service to the interests of people on either side of the Blue Ridge out here in my part of Virginia.
ICYMI
- Ralph Northam must resign
- Immediately, if not sooner | Jay Jones needs to end his attorney general campaign
- Here we go again: Kaine, Warner vote to confirm another Trump nominee
- Richmond Democrats continue to ignore us out here in the hinterlands
Without a doubt, I’d get more engagement on YouTube, Facebook Reels and TikTok if I could book the governor, our U.S. senators, our State Senate and House of Delegates leaders for interviews.
If the psychic cost to get that kind of access is whitewashing how Virginia Democrats are falling short of what their voters expect from them, I’ll make do – and you’ll just have to keep looking at my ugly mug and read and listen to me report and pontificate solo, or not, as the case may be.
It doesn’t rankle me so much as a journalist that politicians and their handlers prefer to work with media members who won’t push back, because I understand that – it’s human nature.
Does bother me as a citizen and taxpayer, which I am even before I’m a journo – and is what motivates me to do what I do all day, every day.
Anyway, they’re telling me the situation is resolved.
I can expect to get canned responses to questions on the issues of the day like everybody else.
Whoopee.
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