A Fastidiously Fair Forum for Candidates
SACRAMENTO — Inside the modest studio with the faux pillars and the flags of the United States and California, all candidates for governor are created equal.
They are endowed by a man named John Hancock (appropriately enough) with certain inalienable rights. Among these are: life (30 minutes of free air time), liberty (to say most whatever they please) and the pursuit of happiness (a chance to stand on equal footing, for once, with all their fellow candidates).
What happens here at the nonprofit California Channel flies in the face of many of the media descriptions of the campaign to replace Gov. Gray Davis. There's no circus. No freak show. No apparent sign of democracy's imminent collapse.
Instead, every day, earnest men and women troop to the station's corner offices across the street from the state Capitol to talk about fixing the debt, cutting government waste and helping students pay their fees.
"It's the media that says it's a circus, but they are the ones who are showing the girl with the giant [chest] and the guy with the fruit," candidate Gino Matorana says, rotating his hands in slow-motion imitation of comic/juggler/candidate who goes by the single name Gallagher.
"Why don't they put a suit on these people and make 'em answer some questions?"
That, in essence, is what the California Channel has done. Hancock has taped half-hour interviews with Matorana and more than two dozen of the candidates who hope to replace Davis if the governor is recalled in the Oct. 7 election. Hancock has scheduled about 50 additional interviews to date. He will take all 135 people listed on the ballot if they call and schedule a time.
Beginning Sept. 22, the interviews will be aired once or twice, possibly more, by 157 cable operators that serve 5.4 million homes -- about half the households in the state -- on a channel the public might know for its regular coverage of the California Legislature.
The California Channel interviews have become an oasis of respect and fairness for dozens of candidates on an arid campaign trail, where they are often belittled or overlooked by a press corps focused on half a dozen front-runners.
Hancock, who crams in as many as seven interviews a day, is a onetime lobbyist for the cable industry who brings to his job a passion for dispassion.
