Covering Riley Moore’s running-for-Congress announcement
A look at how the Wheeling Intelligencer and WV Metro News covered the story
The Intelligencer: 1200 words for an Ogden favorite
Back in September, the Wheeling Intelligencer ran its one (and only) article about the Democratic candidate for Congress, Barry Wendell. Today, that same paper ran a top-of-the-front-page article about Republican Riley Moore, who announced yesterday that he is running for that same position in 2024. The word count for the Wendell article was slightly over 700 words. Today’s Moore article is 1200 words. (For the Intelligencer, that’s a lot of words.) We are almost two years from the next election and already, one of the Republican candidates has received significantly more coverage than this year’s congressional Democratic candidate did all this year. This, despite Ogden’s annual August reminder that
Our editorial leadership is guided solely by devotion to the best interests of our readers, without regard to any political party or ideology.
The article is by Steven Allen Adams, Ogden’s political reporter. Regular Ogden readers have probably noticed that one of Adams’ responsibilities is to regularly write puff pieces about the descendants of former West Virginia Republican governor, Arch Moore. Sometimes these pieces have news value (like today), but most of the time they’re just PR releases: they quote the subject extensively, and they’re always the longest article in that day's paper. In today’s article, for example, 568 of the 1200 words are direct quotes from Riley Moore.
I checked on Adams’ previous Moore family articles and here are the top five by word count:
Four years ago – Adams’ first piece on Riley Moore suggested that he was going to run for state treasurer in 2020. It was 1500 words and it started with what is now required in most Moore articles, that Riley had started his career as a welder.
In 2018, Adams covered Senator Capito’s co-sponsorship of an infrastructure bill: 1400 words even though the bill was introduced but never got out of committee.
The same year, Senator Shelley Moore Capito was a co-sponsor on a police reform bill. This was worth 1300 words and it had the same fate as the previous bill.
Today’s story on Riley Moore’s decision to run for Congress.
In 2021, Adams wrote about “workhorse Capito.” (Senator Shelley, again.) 1250 words and we learned little.
(My personal PR favorite is from earlier this year: “Shelley Moore Capito Is Staying Busy In Washington.” In it, we learned that Capito is staying busy.)
Hoppy Kerchival’s “Talkline” and WV Metro News
Before making his formal announcement, Moore was on Hoppy Kercheval’s “Talkline” program yesterday morning:
.@RileyMooreWV continues to discuss his candidacy for the Republican nomination for Congress in the 2nd District. He joins @HoppyKercheval. WATCH: https://t.co/yCFQ3nm85Y pic.twitter.com/vAMMupeVBO
— MetroNews (@WVMetroNews) November 21, 2022
On the program, Moore labeled himself an “American First conservative” and a firm supporter of Donald Trump. (He also confessed to being in Mar a Lago for Trump’s decision to run.) When asked whether he accepted the outcome of the presidential election, Moore hedged and said that the election was “never thoroughly vetted.” Sadly, Hoppy didn’t push him for examples of voting irregularities.
On the other hand, Kercheval did ask “how” on Moore’s assertion that Biden was “destroying the country.” Moore also suggested that Biden was risking nuclear war over the situation in the Ukraine. Given Moore’s previous lobbying work (under Paul Manafort) for the previous government in the Ukraine that was friendly to Russia, I was surprised that Moore raised the issue; this would have been an excellent time for Hoppy to ask Moore about his years of lobbying for the Russian-backed regime in the Ukraine. Unfortunately, Moore’s whiting-out of the four years that he worked as a lobbyist appears to have worked. Kercheval didn’t bring it up and the biography in the Metro News companion article about Moore’s announcement, makes no mention of it:
Prior to serving in elected office, Moore worked as a national security staffer for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, as a contract employee for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and as an employee of the defense and aerospace firm Textron Inc.
Moore’s lobbying work in the Ukraine needs to be discussed. I’m not very confident that any of the state’s stenographers will bring it up; can we get a Democratic candidate that calls attention to this issue? (Come to think of it, I’m not optimistic on that, either.)
