Richardson and the Fourth Estate: A tale of political give and take | Local News

During his eight-year tenure as New Mexico’s governor — which included the good, the bad and the ugly — he would confront reporters face-to-face and direct his public relations staff to “fight back” and cut journalists off if he considered their reporting unfair.

In his first term, Richardson enjoyed a long honeymoon with the media. He was no neophyte: he’d already served as U.S. secretary of energy, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and congressman, and had started to make a name for himself as an international negotiator.

Richardson, most reporters agreed then and now, basked in the spotlight, and pursued projects and initiatives that generated large-type headlines.

Richardson would hold regular news conferences at the state Capitol and answer a volley of questions from reporters, a rarity these days among politicians guided by ever-present consultants and spokespeople trying to control the message. Reporters remember Richardson taping segments with CNN and other outlets in a TV studio in the Roundhouse, then meeting with the local journalists waiting for a piece of the action in the hallway.

A skilled negotiator, Richardson was savvy in cultivating relationships with reporters, using his charm, sense of humor and physical presence.

“Whether he was campaigning for governor or Congress or president, he was a great retail politician, and he used those same skills with the media — with mixed results,” said Thom Cole, a former longtime investigative reporter for the Albuquerque Journal and The New Mexican.

Richardson ignored traditional boundaries between elected officials and journalists whose job it is to hold politicians accountable.

He would get in their face and step on their toes.

He would remove their eyeglasses and smudge the lenses with his fingers.

He would pretend to head-butt reporters and playfully wrap his hands around their necks.

In some instances, he probably wasn’t joking.

Richardson’s relationship with the media was sometimes sour and strained — particularly in his second term when a pay-to-play scandal rocked his administration and upended a chance to serve as former President Barack Obama’s commerce secretary.

Headlines and stories that cast Richardson in an unflattering light revealed what could be described as a Jekyll and Hyde personality with the media.

When the news was good, Richardson was affable and accessible.

When it wasn’t, he was prickly and bad-tempered.

“When he was running for governor the first time, he didn’t like some story I’d written, and he comes up to me at some campaign event, pokes his finger in my chest and says, ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you,’ ” recalled Steve Terrell, a retired journalist and longtime statehouse reporter for The New Mexican.

Terrell didn’t remember what story set Richardson off. But he remembered the experience.

“He let his feelings be known,” he said. “But then again, at the end of the day, he basically liked the press. He liked the attention. But he didn’t always like the coverage.”

Kate Nelson, who covered Richardson’s first term as governor for the Albuquerque Tribune, said Richardson was incredibly charming, funny and smart.

“Just conversing with him was an uplifting experience, but when he was mad, you knew it,” she said.

Cole recalled writing a column that portrayed Richardson as Santa Claus handing out raises to his political appointees.

“He blew an absolute fuse,” he said. “I was kind of persona non grata with him for a while.”

Richardson, Nelson said, had a boyish charm that could veer to schoolyard bully.

“So, the adversarial relationship that the press has to have with politicians was very much at the fore with Richardson, trying to hold his feet to the fire, get him back on the question that you wanted answered, challenge him on things that seemed questionable,” she said. “He kept us on our toes.”

After he was elected to his first term as governor in November 2002, Richardson transformed the media landscape in New Mexico, hiring seasoned reporters and others in the news business, including the editorial page editor of the Albuquerque Journal, to serve in his administration. Most landed public relations jobs.

Among them was Gilbert Gallegos, who covered Richardson’s first campaign for governor as a reporter for the Albuquerque Tribune and then went to work for him as deputy communications director.

“He wanted more central control over communications and messaging and that sort of thing, so that was part of it, but he did that with everything,” he said.

Gallegos, now a spokesman for the Albuquerque Police Department, acknowledged relationships with reporters grew testy at times.

“He had thick skin. He taught me to have thick skin, that’s for sure. But there were things that could get under that skin, and he would fight back and expect us to fight back,” Gallegos said.

Asked how the administration would fight back, Gallegos said “a lot of times it was just delivering a message. He was big into kind of passing them a signal. He would just not talk to them or tell us, ‘We’re not going to deal with him.’ If he felt they were not being fair to him, then we [wouldn’t] work with that reporter.”

But, Gallegos added, “usually something would get worked out.”

“He had me deliver some very unpleasant messages to certain editors and publishers,” he said. “At times, he would do it himself.”

Gallegos said Richardson’s approach was not unique to reporters.

“Even with friends of his and supporters, if he felt like they did something wrong, he would kind of send them a message or we talked about putting them in the doghouse for a little while,” he said, laughing.

Like other reporters, Kate Nash, who covered Richardson for The New Mexican, recalled the difficulties the governor sometimes presented. But he also made the statehouse beat fun and exciting at times. Nash traveled to Mexico City and Caracas, Venezuela, with Richardson and reported on his interactions with their respective presidents, Vicente Fox and Hugo Chávez.

“It became even more fun, or more challenging, I should say, when he decided to run for president because the access that he allowed to local reporters definitely changed,” she said, adding his attention shifted to national news outlets.

Nash recalled a time a journalist from one of those outlets remarked Richardson “had a really nice tan” when he introduced him to a national audience.

“We’re all here going like, ‘Actually, around here, that’s called being Hispanic,’ ” she said, laughing. “But we did our best. We kept the pressure on locally.”

Trip Jennings, who started covering Richardson for the Albuquerque Journal well into the third year of his first term as governor, said he remembers journalists ending up on an “enemies list.”

“I’m not sure there was an official enemies list, but there were [reporters] that staff people were not supposed to talk to,” he said. “I probably wound up on that list a few times.”

Despite the occasional acrimony, Jennings said Richardson made covering statehouse politics fun and exciting.

“I think those who covered him were fortunate,” he said. “I miss some of those days sometimes. I miss those press conferences. They were not fun sometimes, then and there, but I miss them now because, frankly, I feel like I survived the stress test.”

Michael Coleman, who used to work as the Albuquerque Journal’s Washington correspondent, said he butted heads with Richardson on occasion, but Richardson was always accessible.

“Things got tense during the Wen Ho Lee controversy when he was secretary of energy and all that controversy was swirling,” he said, referring to an espionage investigation and indictment of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee.

“He could be tough and critical of coverage and stuff like that, but he always called me back, and I felt that he generally tried to shoot pretty straight, and politicians don’t always do that,” he said.

“One thing that I appreciated about him — I’m sure it was his self-interest to some degree — but when he came to Washington, he called me up or had his staff call me up and let me know what his itinerary was and allowed me to be present for the things he was doing in Washington … and he was there a lot.”

Tim Archuleta, a former managing editor and reporter at the Albuquerque Tribune, said Richardson was probably one of the most skilled political figures in New Mexico at the time.

“He had a lot of experience, and he was very masterful in using longtime connections and developing relationships with people who were going to cover him,” he said.

“If you look at some of the postings on social media now [about] encounters between reporters and Bill Richardson, you’ll see that journalists back then had access to him, and you see them sharing stories about how he would recognize them in other moments in their lives when he was governor,” he said.

“I think that just goes to show that Governor Richardson didn’t shy away from developing relationships with journalists, but he also wasn’t the most transparent governor once he got into office,” he said.

After Richardson died, Nelson took to Facebook to share one of her favorite stories about Richardson.

“Richardson was still a congressman at the time, and I was a doe in the woods when it came to covering New Mexico politics,” said Nelson, who moved to New Mexico in 1989 after working as a reporter at the Kansas City Star.

“I’m at the old Dukes stadium one night watching the ballgame, and Richardson arrives and ends up sitting a few rows in front of us,” she said.

Although reluctant at first, Nelson wandered over to Richardson, who remembered who she was. At his invitation, she sat with Richardson for a few innings.

“I remember this feeling of almost wonder that any old citizen, that being me, could sit with a congressperson at a minor league ballgame shooting the breeze on a summer’s evening,” she said. “That was pretty phenomenal. I didn’t experience that when I worked at the Kansas City Star, so I like to remember that he could be that guy, too.”

Nelson said Richardson was “just so nice” anytime she encountered him after his tenure as governor.

“I think there’s a really good guy in there,” she said. “But politics is hard.”

Cheryl Wittenauer, who worked at The New Mexican from 1986 to 1991, said she would interview Richardson occasionally. At the time, he was a relatively new congressman.

She said she was impressed by his accessibility. After writing a long profile about a prosecutor caught up in controversy, she said Richardson called to tell her how much he enjoyed the story.

“I’m right out of graduate school, a new reporter, and I was so impressed by that,” said Wittenauer, who now lives in St. Louis. “I was like, ‘Wow. What a cool guy.’ ”

She said she was struck by news of Richardson’s death.

“I was really sad, and I thought, ‘Gosh, he’s still so young,’ ” she said. “He had so much more to give.”