ANNAPOLIS — CLARIFICATION - In an article in Thursday's editions of The Sun about Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s relationship with the media, the governor said he had been endorsed by only one newspaper in the state. Yesterday, Ehrlich's press office clarified his remarks to acknowledge that he had received endorsements from several Maryland newspapers.
ANNAPOLIS - On a television comedy show scheduled to air later this summer, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. plays the amiable host. He fences with Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, winces at off-color jokes made by his longtime buddy Steve Rouse of WQSR-FM and pretends to work at a Wendy's fast food restaurant.
The governor's willingness to perform on the WMAR-TV show - a pilot tentatively called Baltimore Saturday Nite - reflects his desire to court Marylanders through unconventional media outlets. It also embodies the lesson Ehrlich says he has learned from the press coverage he has received since his January inauguration.
The lesson, by his reckoning, is this: The two dominant newspapers in the region, The Sun and The Washington Post, are eager to see the state's first Republican governor in a generation fail. As proof, Ehrlich and his aides point to what they contend is a pattern of mistreatment by the two papers, from unsympathetic headlines, careless errors and mischaracterization of policy to consistently dismissive assessments in news columns and on editorial pages.
In 1995, tough press accounts gave then Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat, a rocky first several months. But, Ehrlich says, most of the articles about Glendening focused on scandals. Much of the negative coverage of Ehrlich involves policy matters. "There was no honeymoon," Ehrlich says. "We viewed it as a sustained campaign to hurt the administration before it got off the ground."
Unpretentious and approachable, Ehrlich typically performs well before the camera and in the public eye. Since his earliest days as an elected official, he has spent hours indulging questions from talk radio hosts, television reporters and writers from smaller newspapers. Now Ehrlich's aides say he pursues these outlets more than ever because of his treatment by the state's two largest newspapers. And, in recent months, the two papers have sometimes encountered a sluggish response to requests for information and interviews from state officials, even as television reporters have been swiftly accommodated.
