AUGUSTA, Maine — After nearly 50 years covering eight governors and countless lawmakers and elections, the dean of the Maine State House press corps has filed his last story.
Maine Public’s Mal Leary, 70, reported in Augusta for decades with the anecdotes to show for it. His reporting career began in 1975, just as independent Gov. James Longley was taking office. Since then, he has chronicled milestone moments from a 1992 ballot-tampering scandal that incriminated aides of Rep. John Martin, D-Eagle Lake, and led to his ouster as House speaker to blockbuster campaigns and the fraught era of former Gov. Paul LePage.
His last day on Friday closed after a historic news year driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and meant the departure of one of Maine’s most trusted reporters. We talked to him about the state of politics and the media. His answers were edited and condensed for clarity.
BDN: How are you feeling about the end of a long career?
Leary: Good. I’m glad it’s over. You’re starting it, so it hasn’t quite totally sunk into your consciousness, the absolute ridiculousness of the State House.
BDN: How so?
Leary: The Legislature does stuff that makes no sense. The procedures often make no sense. When I’ve done some college seminars, I tell them, “Don’t believe what they tell you about how the government works, because it doesn’t.” Oftentimes it’s “You voted against me on my bill, so I’m going to vote against you on your bill.” It hasn’t been that prevalent this session, but I’ve seen it in committees time after time.
I’m tired of the nonsense in politics. Politics is fun when you’re actually dealing with issues. When the clash is over, do we do this and we do that, do we invest in this or invest in that? But so much of it is picayune stuff, personality-driven stuff.
BDN: What drew you into reporting?
Leary: My career actually started in television at WABI in Bangor, not as a reporter but as the director of the 6 o’clock news. So I got to see all the news being developed and all the politicians coming through for interviews.
I learned the power of the media in an unfortunate way. Back in those days, you didn’t have cell phones and pagers, so the director was on the spot. If something big happened, you had to decide, ‘Do we take it from CBS or do we continue with our regular programming?’
We got a flash from CBS that Vice President Spiro Agnew was going to give a speech attacking the media and CBS was going to be carrying it live. It was going to cut into our programming. I tried to get the general manager to ask, ‘What I should do?’ and I couldn’t reach him. … I was like “We’re going to take the feed live; it’s important.”
At the time, it was deciding what most of the people in eastern Maine were going to see. So that to me showed the power of this medium is very important.
BDN: So many reporters come to you when we need to vent or get an explanation. What were your first days like working in Augusta?
Leary: It was so different then because newspapers had reporters here. It was usually the State House person and they would cover a story of importance and they relied on the Associated Press and United Press International [Leary’s first employer in the State House] to cover everything else. So I would be writing three, four or five stories a day, all of them short. You learn a lot that way and you learned the importance of boiling down to the essentials because too often we as journalists want to go off on some of these details that are interesting to us. But Joe Public goes, “Why? Who cares?”
BDN: How has reporting changed in the last 40 years and what do you think of the direction that the industry is going in?
Leary: I fear for our profession because newspapers are having so much trouble coming up with a model that works to pay for what they do. They’ve been shrinking. They’ve all been shrinking. Here is kind of a specialized beat: Government and politics kind of merge together. You really need to spend the time and effort to understand that and to learn about it and people get rotated in and out so fast they never get to know how it works.
I think we’re in trouble because of the changing nature of society itself. I mean, the internet is huge. People can get all kinds of sources. The Legislature streams full debates and public hearings; Congress does too. That’s a big change. It used to be that the public had to rely on reporters to tell them, “This is what was happening.”
Another thing — I don’t know how to put this nicely — is the increasing use of [spokespeople] by the Legislature. There are more flacks than there are reporters in this building. The Legislature is spending more time and more money putting out publicity as opposed to reporters putting out more news and that has a big impact.
BDN: What do you think of the direction politics is going?
Leary: Politicians are far more ideological and far less willing to listen to the other side. That’s not to say they’re all that way.
Take Rep. Sawin Millett [R-Waterford] He’s been in the executive branch, and he’s been on the appropriations committee several times. People like that understand you don’t get everything you want and you’ve got to negotiate for what you think is important, with what the other people think is important. And he gets it, and there are a number of Democrats that get it too. Rep. John Martin for the same reason, in that he’s done it.
BDN: Is there anything really goofy that happened during your time here?
Leary: We’ve had some real characters come through here. We had a representative from Westbrook, Stanley Laffin, whose nickname was “Tuffy.” He loved his cigars, and was furious when they banned smoking in the House. One day, the session’s going along and I happened to be in the chamber. Martin brought down the gavel and broke it and called out Laffin, who was under his desk in that space under the desk and was smoking a cigar. The smoke was coming up. Martin threatened to have him removed if he didn’t stop smoking.
There are other funny ones. Before they had the air conditioning they would open the windows in the House chamber. Inevitably, a bat would come in and you would have the session grind to a halt.