www.roanoke.com

Dan L. Frei

Frei has been directing Nelson Harris's political campaigns for the past 14 years. He was also the campaign director of the Trinkle, Mason and Dowe campaign two years ago. He lives in Roanoke.

Fourteen years ago in 1994, in his first campaign for elective office, one of the items Nelson Harris campaigned for was to renew Victory Stadium. There was a small article in the newspaper about it, but no TV station showed up at the press conference, and the candidate, a Democratic nominee, received no support on the issue from Mayor David Bowers, then in the second year of his first term, or from other members of council or from people in the community. He lost that first campaign by a little more than 400 votes to my friend Jack Parrott.

I know this because I was his campaign director in 1994, and have been in all of his campaigns for public office in Roanoke since then. He ran again two years later and was elected as vice mayor.

In the 2004 mayoral campaign, Councilman Harris was for the renovation of Victory Stadium if it could have been accomplished for $10 million or less. Naturally, people heard only what they wanted to hear, and the "for $10 million or less" got lost in the heat. The estimates were in the $23 million range to renovate Victory Stadium, so candidate Harris was not for that.

Harris did not, as asserted in Dan Radmacher's column of May 11, (Harris sails off into the sunset) " ... [run] for mayor [in 2004] promising to save the decrepit stadium." There it was: the caveat of "for $10 million or less" ignored again.

In many ways over the past year and a half, The Roanoke Times as well as other local media have been guilty of what Bill Moyers has called "a bias of simplification" when it comes to connecting candidates to issues.

Radmacher complained that "under his mayoral leadership, Roanoke City Council acted more like the Soviet Politburo than a small city democracy." That is an absurd assertion and again reveals the bias of simplification.

Jim Trout, many times elected to Roanoke City Council from the '70s to the '90s, had a stock phrase that went: "When you get to four, get off the phone." He understood that it required four votes from a seven-member body to get anything passed, and he often sniffed out via telephone council members' sentiments before raising an issue.

The same was true of Vice Mayor David Trinkle sniffing out the sentiments of council members on the potential location of a potential concert venue site, but this time it was via e-mail rather than rotary telephone. The newspaper accused Trinkle of governmental secrecy, when in fact he had simply "got to four and got off the phone."

The Roanoke Times ran a scathing editorial criticizing the council for scheduling a closed session on a certain issue for the next council meeting. Harris e-mailed Radmacher that same day and said no such closed session was on the agenda. Radmacher e-mailed back asserting indeed it was, as they had seen it "listed." Harris' follow-up was that no such document or agenda existed showing any such thing, and that either Radmacher was fabricating such or someone had fabricated such to him and he was passing it along. Radmacher shot back that he stood by his claim. Harris, then, roped in the publisher and suggested they produce this "agenda" listing the closed session that was the subject of their editorial. They could not. This led to the editorial page issuing a rare "correction" the following day stating that they were indeed in error and that no closed session had been scheduled. That was the only time Harris ever questioned Radmacher's ethics. He did not, as asserted by Radmacher in his recent column, "[shoot] off e-mails (plural) that were quick to call our motives and ethics into question."

Radmacher is right about one thing when he wrote: "Nelson Harris ... genuinely cares about Roanoke. He had a compelling vision for the city's future and worked to make that vision reality," but it is revealing that same column ended with "I have a feeling Roanoke will learn to miss having him to kick around," no doubt with The Roanoke Times leading the way.

The voters are not children and they deserve a more robust exposition of public performance from the media, not a bias that comes from simplification.