For most all candidates seeking office, particularly in state and local level elections, meetings with the editorial board of the local dead tree press are one of the unpleasant facts of life on the campaign trail. This experience, at least for Republican candidates, tends to be proportionately more unpleasant the closer one gets to an ocean. One set of GOP hopefuls got to experience this first hand recently in Oregon when they sat down with the board of the Willamette Week. As Fox News reports, a senate candidate was asked to leave the room after pointing out activities by a reporter which were beyond the pale even for a very liberal press outlet.

A Republican Senate candidate was kicked out of a local Oregon newspaper’s editorial board meeting after daring to challenge a reporter who dissed a fellow candidate by writing “blah blah blah” in his notes instead of her actual quotes.

The entire argument was captured on video and posted online by the newspaper, Willamette Week…

The video shows an editorial board meeting where the newspaper was interviewing Republican candidates for Senate. One of those candidates, Jo Rae Perkins, was responding to a question over the phone when Callahan noticed something was amiss.

“You want to talk about disrespect, I see what you’re writing down there,” he said, pointing at a reporter at the table. “You just wrote down ‘blah blah blah blah blah’ for everything that Jo Rae said. Jo Rae is a respectable woman. Why are you not respecting her by writing ‘blah blah blah blah blah’ on your notepad?”

Even if it weren’t for the physical evidence of the reporter’s complete lack of interest in providing any sort of unbiased evaluation of the candidates’ positions, the rest of the questions were a dead giveaway. In an attempt to change the subject, Callahan was then asked if he thought climate change was “a myth or reality.” The follow-up question apparently sealed the deal.

“Where are you on the Easter Bunny?”

I’ve had to sit through a few of these over the years with candidates and they can be really infuriating events, but even in New York I’ve never run into one quite this bad. But we can’t let that discourage people from running for office. All we can do is return to the age old question which really spawned the evolution of modern blogging in the first place…

Why, oh why, can’t we have a decent media?