Bob Plain, of RI Future, just tweeted an interesting objection to a news genre of which Monique’s latest post is probably an example, from his point of view: “When it comes to public employees, #RImedia focuses TONS of attention on the outliers. Why? Like car accidents/house fires, it sells…”

As I replied, of what topic is that not true?  Celebrities, deviants, traumas, disasters, even Plain’s much beloved trope of “the 1%” — what makes something news is that it’s new and/or out of the ordinary.  If taxpayers are getting their money’s worth from employees most of the time, that doesn’t make it less newsworthy that they’ve spent around $200,000 keeping one in a holding pattern.

And what makes news relevant is whether anything can be done in response to it.  Does a disaster indicate anything that people not affected should do, or anything that should be changed that might have prevented it?  Are there policies or social factors that make a 1% inevitable?  Is there something about the way government is constructed that makes it possible for a complaint against an employee to turn into a two-year paid vacation for that employee, or that makes employees feel as if they can spend 60% of their time working on their own projects?

If there’s a problem with Rhode Island news media, as a group, it’s not that they’re too skilled at finding misbehaving government workers, it’s that they spend a vanishingly small amount of time exposing the reasons that Rhode Island government is structurally likely to create these “outliers.”