San Antonio Express-News Backs GOP's Stogner for RRC

San Antonio Express-News Doesn't Back Stogner for RRC

Endorsement Recall Shows Why People
Can't Believe All They Read in the Paper

Capitol Inside
February 18, 2022

The San Antonio Express-News made a highly compelling case for Republican Sarah Stogner in a bid for the Texas Railroad Commission in 2022 - arguing in an endorsement that she offered GOP primary voters the best of both worlds as a guardian of the environment and oil and the profit line for the industry it regulates..

The Alamo City's only major newspaper declared that Stogner would bring ingenuity and integrity to a state agency that's had little or none of either as a rubber stamp for big-giving donors who've controlled the RRC since Republicans gained a monopoly on the three-member board almost 30 years ago.

But the Express-News opinion page editors made it clear that all of those qualities combined weren't as important as the perception of old-fashioned family values when it recanted the paper's glowing assessment for Stogner three days later after she aired a campaign ad that offended its righteous sensibilities.

The moral purists in the SAEN editorial department admitted that they'd been shocked and disgusted after learning that Stogner posed for her first commercial in panties with stars over both nipples and cowboy attire on her head and feet while bucking up and down on an oil pump jack. The opinion writers didn't day whether the timing of the five-second video that she released after the day after they'd lavished praise on her in the endorsement.

But the Express-News editorialists suggested that they simply couldn't live with the thought of issuing an endorsement to a candidate who'd failed to adhere to the high moral standards that the newspaper had always embraced.

"It’s painful to rescind a recommendation," the SA confessed in the shifting of its support to Dawayne Tipton as the RRC candidate who'd been its second choice. "But this is an opportunity to reaffirm our principles and expectations. We expect candidates for public office to model civil discourse and decorum worthy of the public’s trust. This was neither. Instead, it’s an indictment of these times that a candidate, even a marginal one, would appeal to potential voters in such a way via social media. If Stogner was looking for a way to talk about the issues — and concerns about flaring, venting, misogyny and ethics reform are salient — this was an embarrassing failure."

The SAEN scribes who are paid to put their employer's opinion in writing didn't show any concern for the damage to the paper's credibility with the abrupt about-face on Stogner. They didn't seem worried that the monumental endorsement recall could a glaring sign of why the print news business has become a relic of the past in a country where young people depend on television and social media for all of the information that they obtain about their nation, cities and states.

While expressing the paper's disappointment about jumping the gun on Stogner, the SAEN opinion professionals didn't seem to comprehend how foolish they'd made SA's only major daily look by failing to stand by its convictions that appear to be superficial now in a move that put the Express-News back on the same page with Republicans who've had nothing in common with the goals and priorities that it had articulated so eloquently in the endorsement.

The newspaper didn't seem concerned on how embarrassing the bizarre recanting of its own words might be for the rest of a dying industry or how much the endorsement could give the Stogner as a candidate who cut the ad for the singular sake of shock value that would draw attention that she desperately needed after refusing to accept contributions as a symbolic expression on a promise that she wasn't for sale to anyone.

Here's why the Express-News declared Stogner to be the most qualified candidate in the endorsement on the eve of Super Sunday.

"From looking at ways to offer incentives to natural gas producers, to prioritize reliability over profits, to ideas on enforcing regulations that are already on the book, Stogner offers the vision, energy and tenacity to make real changes at the RRC."

The paper elaborated on the reasons that it had found Stogner so attractive. "Her priorities are to put Texans to work in the energy sector, prevent federal invention, and establish ways to measure and evaluate the commission's efforts with an eye toward rewarding innovation. She ultimately hopes to change the RRC's culture while bolstering environmental stewardship and economic success."

Stogner would approach her work with a "sense of urgency," the paper said before deciding that it had been moved to swiftly and no longer meant what it said about her originally.

Capitol Inside editor and publisher Mike Hailey is an award-winning journalist who covered Texas politics for the Houston Post, Austin American-Statesman and Waco Tribune-Herald before stint as Lt. Governor Bob Bullock's press secretary. His column Hailey's Comment appears on a regular basis in Capitol Inside.