Declaring Rule 13 For Having An iPhone

By Kleinheider Posted on May 5, 2008 at 12:13 am

A very interesting article appeared in the Tennessean under the byline of Theo Emery this weekend taking to task, Senator Bill Ketron for his failure to declare Rule 13 until after the vote on the cable compromise bill which gave telcom giant AT&T the ability to enter the Tennessee cable market under conditions, more or less, of their choosing.

Now, I’m not one to declare media bias or make constant notations about which party’s candidates and officeholders get their party affiliation mentioned when they do dirt and which party’s candidates and office holders do not, but this article seems both rather hard on the Senator and quite emphatic about which party he belonged to.

Of course, nothing would seem much amiss about the Senator being called out for not being as upfront with his conflict of interest as he could have been or his party being mentioned had it not been for the fact that it is the other party who seems to have the more intriguing conflicts of interest in the AT&T deal.

As has been noted, while Senator Ketron’s wife simply works for the wireless division of the telcom giant many, many folks with ties to the Bredesen administration and the Democratic Speaker of the House’s wife were hired by AT&T as lobbyists, consultants and PR men. The fact that these connections were mentioned by the very same author of the Ketron piece two months ago makes the lack of that information in the recent article all the more troublesome.

This weekend’s article focuses almost completely on Ketron, a Republican, and his decision to declare Rule 13, which means a legislator is declaring a possible conflict of interest, with the clerk’s office rather than from the floor. The article paints this as somehow nefarious even though at the end of the article the author concedes that a member of the opposite party did the exact same thing.

The reporter also goes so far as to interview the spokesman for AT&T about the Ketron situation without even mentioning the fact that until very recently that spokesman worked for the Bredesen administration.

It just seemed after reading the article focusing on a prominent Republican and his conflict of interest on the AT&T deal that the interests of the Bredesen administration and the Speaker of the House were well served by such a piece appearing after the deal was done, making much of the connections the same reporter brought to light two months ago, a distant memory in the public mind.

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Tags: AT&T, Betty Anderson, Bill Ketron, Bob Corney, Jimmy Naifeh, Rule 13