Want to know what Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich is thinking? Just listen:
The difference between Virginia's budget situation and Maryland's? "They have a huge surplus because they passed taxes when they didn't need to," Ehrlich said last month.
The controversy over an Ehrlich fundraiser held at a Baltimore golf club that has no black members? "All a bunch of nothing," he declared on July 5.
His feelings about stem cell research? "I support stem cell research, including embryonic stem cell research," he stated in April as the General Assembly was considering whether to allow state funding of it.
Ehrlich didn't make those pronouncements in a news release, press conference or newspaper interview. Instead, each time the venue was the same: the radio call-in programs on WBAL (1090 AM), Baltimore's powerful -- and generally conservative -- news-and-talk station. When the governor has something to say, chances are he'll say it on Chip Franklin's morning program or Ron Smith's afternoon drive-time show on the station. Or maybe he'll save it for his biweekly "Stateline With Governor Ehrlich," a live, one-hour program that airs on WBAL on Saturday mornings.
Ehrlich used to pop up on WBAL from time to time when he was a Baltimore area congressman. But since taking office in Annapolis in 2003, the Republican governor has practically become a fixture at the station. How often has he been on? "Way into the hundreds of times" is the best guess of his chief spokesman, Paul E. Schurick.
In fact, the frequent studio appearances and phone-ins (for better sound quality, Ehrlich uses a special WBAL hookup in the State House) are part of his unusual media strategy. It's fair to say that Ehrlich regards traditional news outlets the way a possum regards a skunk. Although he talks to reporters irregularly, both he and his wife, Kendel Ehrlich, have been harshly critical of newspaper coverage of his administration.
Ehrlich deemed the Baltimore Sun's reporting so unfair that in November he banned state employees from talking to the Sun's top political writer and one of its columnists. In 2003, he briefly stopped talking to a Washington Post reporter assigned to cover him. The newspaper's relationship with Ehrlich "has been smooth at times, rocky at others," says R.B. Brenner, The Post's Maryland editor.
Talk radio, on the other hand, enables Ehrlich to bypass reporters and take his message straight to The People, or at least the people who listen to WBAL and a few other talk stations he favors in the state. That those people tend to be the kind who already support Ehrlich -- talk radio generally attracts conservative listeners -- is all part of the plan.
"Talk radio is direct, immediate and unfiltered," says Schurick, who devised Ehrlich's media strategy. "The governor gets to talk directly with members of the public. . . . The other extreme is the print media, where there are three or four people whose judgment is part of the reporting. We could disagree about whether that's good or bad, but we'd certainly agree that talk radio is more immediate."
Of course it's also a medium in which a politician's statements can fly by without the sort of fact-checking, follow-up questioning and contrary opinions that news reporting provides. That, too, some suspect, is part of the plan. When, for example, Ehrlich said recently on WBAL that he "turned around" Maryland's budget deficit, no one bothered to point out that Ehrlich's plans to raise money with slot machines failed or that other factors -- an improving economy, initiatives by the Democrat-controlled General Assembly -- might have had something to do with the turnaround, too.
This, of course, drives Ehrlich's opponents crazy.
