This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
2025 marked South Dakota's 100th legislative session. We couldn't find any political reporters who have been involved in every one of those sessions, but we did find journalist Bob Mercer.
He has covered or participated in every session since 1985. That's 40 years of politics.
Mercer is now the state capitol bureau reporter with KELOLAND Media Group. He's been a longtime presence in the Capitol as a journalist and as former Gov. Bill Janklow's press secretary.
____________________________________________________________
The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Bob Mercer:
I grew up in Wisconsin and in a town of about 5,000 people. I delivered the daily newspaper. It was a five-day-a-week paper, and I delivered that, and I started when I was about 10 and did it for a few years and then moved on.
Lori Walsh:
And did you have an idea at that age that there was something in the news, something that was in the newspaper or something that people made it, or were you just a kid on a bike essentially?
Bob Mercer:
Well, I was a kid on a bike, but my mom was a big newspaper reader, and so at our house, we didn't have much money, but we got the Milwaukee Journal in the afternoon and the local daily in the afternoon, and then we also subscribed to the weekly newspaper of our hometown.
So I had a lot to read, and my mom also got another paper off and on as times changed.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. When did you start reading the newspaper and finding relevance for your own life?
Bob Mercer:
Oh, probably when I was sitting on the back porch of what we called the agency. We went to a house to get our papers to deliver, and so before we'd head out on our bikes, we'd sit around and read the paper.
It was kind of a fun time, and you'd skim through and you'd look for names. And in the local weekly, I was a decent student, so sometimes my name would be in there. So, yeah.
Lori Walsh:
I love that. You mentioned to me before that you read "The Power Broker" and learned from the great writer Robert Caro about the importance of the documentary "Turn Every Page" about Bob Gottlieb and Bob Caro, the importance of looking in every piece of information you can. Tell me a little bit about the influence of Robert Caro's work and who you are as a journalist.
Bob Mercer:
I mean, "The Power Broker" was his doorstop of a book about Robert Moses, and he was, I guess, for lack of a better term, the director of public works in New York City, but he was much more than that. And what he did when he was a legislator before he became the director of public works was he would piece together different bills in the legislature and one bill could build upon another.
And so what it taught me was I needed to read every bill. A, to know what was going on, but B, to see if there were any patterns of legislators who were building their own little empires, if you will, legislatively.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. It is a book about how power works.
Bob Mercer:
It is.
Lori Walsh:
And you learn from it how to watch and how to report, and how to hold power accountable by paying attention to that. Do I understand you correctly?
Bob Mercer:
And the other thing I learned from Robert Caro himself was just the importance of, as you say, turning every page, reading every page. And so the book, "The Power Broker," oh, it's hundreds, I mean many hundreds of pages, but he documents all of Moses's life, from the time that he would walk out on an island and look and could envision the beaches he was going to build there and things like that. And then the freeways that he built through the city of New York and the housing that he built in the city of New York and the areas that he ran it through, ran those projects through and what they were before and how the neighborhoods changed after those projects came through. And it was often not for the better for those neighborhoods.
For the city of New York, it was probably for the better, but for those neighborhoods, it was not for the better.
Lori Walsh:
Right, right. Do you remember your first legislative session in South Dakota? I know that's jumping ahead a bit, and we might go back and talk about some of your other formative experiences, but do you remember the first time?
Bob Mercer:
Yeah, in 1985, I lived in Aberdeen at that time. I came down for the session. I stayed at the Thrifty Scot Motel, which had plaid carpets, hence the name, or vice versa, I don't know which.
But at the time, I used a manual typewriter and wrote my stories by hand when I got back to my hotel room, and then called the desk at the Aberdeen American News and dictated my stories via phone. And there were no laptops in those days, and they had the old AP teletype machines clattering in the newsroom and things like that. So, it was a much different time.
Lori Walsh:
I legitimately miss those machines. I was saying the other day that when I read the news now on my phone, even though I'm reading it in a newspaper, I might be looking at the app, the newspaper's app on my phone, and I'm like, I never know when I'm done.
Whereas with the newspaper or a broadcast, if I watch KELO-TV, I know when the broadcast has ended. I know when I have finished everything I want to read in the newspaper. And the teletype, you knew when something was coming in that was breaking. And now in my brain, it just seems like it's on all the time, 24/7, and I don't know when it's done.
Bob Mercer:
Well, Twitter is the same way or worse. And I use Twitter, but yeah, it's a crazy world that's changed into.
Lori Walsh:
Do you remember your first big story, your first big breaking news at that time in Pierre?
Bob Mercer:
In 1986, I looked into the political action committees that gave money to influence, at that time, telephone deregulation. That was a hot issue at that time. Northwestern Bell was the telephone provider in South Dakota for all of the communities or most of the communities of any size. And they were fighting in the legislature about that. And Northwestern Bell wanted to be deregulated, if you will, and others didn't want them to deregulate.
And so I looked into who spent money, and it was primarily Northwestern Bell's PAC spent money to influence legislators to get them to vote for deregulation. And there had been no real spending before that by Northwestern Bell, and there was no real spending after that by Northwestern Bell.
So, it was a first lesson in how money can influence politics.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. Yeah. Boy. Huh. All right. What makes a good story in state politics? How do you know? We all have to do, as reporters, we are always doing stories to meet deadlines. When do you know that you've got your hands on something that's just a plain good story?
Bob Mercer:
That's a hard question. I mean, anything that the governor does is probably newsworthy. I don't know. One thing I look at when I'm covering legislation, I look at who sponsors pieces of legislation, and you just get to kind of know who has the political muscle, if you will, to get a bill through and who doesn't. And you just learn that from watching on the ground.
And on the other hand, and I'll give you a recent example. There was a bill a year ago, Senate Bill 201, which would've put a lot of land owner protections in for people who are going to have carbon dioxide pipelines and other pipelines or transmission facilities run through their land. But the bill also changed a provision, and it was a tiny provision and how the Public Utilities Commission worked with local ordinances. And so the old law that was in place was that the commission might override those local ordinances.
And Senate Bill 201 said that the permit from the PUC shall override those local ordinances, and that law got referred. And then last November, the voters overturned that new law, and the voters also went out and elected a whole bunch of new legislators and kicked out a whole bunch of the incumbents who had voted for that law.
And so that one little clause in that one law really changed the makeup of our legislature, and it changed our entire leadership of the legislature this year. And it also then led to a bill coming through this year that the new governor has now signed into law that prohibits carbon dioxide pipelines from using eminent domain to force their way across people's land. That became a big story. And at the time I couldn't see that coming. I don't think anybody saw it coming, but it became a story and it had giant repercussions that'll continue to last for several years now.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. One word, one clause has created this ongoing story. I love how you express that.
Is there a part of you that looks for the next story because of what you think is going to happen? Or is that a way for reporters to go down the wrong path? I thought that was going to happen and it didn't. Therefore, I missed what really happened.
I'm trying to get at this idea of how much of your work is, I'm observing it, I'm following it. I'm tracking it down, and how much of it is, yeah, I understand what's going to happen next because of my experience and insight?
Bob Mercer:
Can't predict the future. That's one thing I've really learned in this is don't try to predict the future.
Lori Walsh:
That's good advice. I think that's good advice in general. Yeah.
One of the things I'd like to ask you, just as someone who does a daily radio show and does multiple interviews a day, I look at your body of work and I wonder how do you keep track of it all? Because sometimes I have a hard time, obviously keeping track of it all.
Information management, do you have files? Is it all in your head? Do you keep all your old notebooks? How are you tracking the information? Because I'm guessing it's not all digital.
Bob Mercer:
It's not.
Lori Walsh:
Thank goodness for me because that's what I want to hear.
Bob Mercer:
No, it's not. But every couple of years I clean up my office and that's when I have to make decisions then. Am I ever going to crack this notebook again? And if I decide it's not, it goes in the garbage bag. And the other thing is that I take a lot of notes now on my laptop in a meeting as opposed to writing on paper. And so that's another way things have changed, but heaven help me if my laptop ever goes down. And the other, as far as video, what I do is once the video is transmitted to KELOLAND, I can wipe it off my computer so I don't have to keep those files at all.
But one of the things I learned from, well, a couple of guys who covered the Capitol here with me through the years, Chet Brokaw with the Associated Press, great, great reporter, Terry Woster with the Argus Leader was a great, great reporter. Kevin Woster, who worked for a number of news organizations, including public broadcasting. He was a great reporter.
And they each had their way of doing things. And so I kind of would steal from them. What did they do that I liked, and what did they do that I didn't like? And so I took the ideas that I liked and I didn't take the ideas that I didn't like and kind of made my own custom way of doing things.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. When you took a turn as a press secretary for Governor Bill Janklow, were there things that you learned being on the other side of this that you carry with you as a journalist now?
Bob Mercer:
Yeah, I sure do. I grew up in a family of deer hunters, and when I worked for Bill Janklow, I learned what it was like to be the deer. I say that in all seriousness.
Yeah, it was a learning experience.
I'll tell you quickly, the reason I went to work for Bill Janklow was he recruited me. It was at the end of his third term. He had just won re-election to a fourth term as governor. He couldn't run for governor again. And at the same time, Tom Daschle was the US Senate Democratic leader at the time. Those two guys got along well, and I just thought, this is a time to maybe go do this. And at the time, Janklow's office in terms of its press relations, just wasn't functional.
As a reporter, when I'd interview Janklow, you'd get a call back six weeks or two months later, and yeah, what do you want to talk about? And well, that was a story six weeks ago.
And when I went to work there, his administrative staff would stand at a fax machine and punch in the numbers, the individual numbers for each news outlet one at a time. And so they would spend hours just distributing one news release.
And a guy who was on Janklow's staff at that time named Mike Mueller, he became my co-worker, if you will. And so what he and I worked out were some arrangements where Mike would work with the Bureau of Information and Telecommunications, the state government's technology arm, if you will, on bringing in technology at the same time that I would work on just writing news releases.
And one of the things I learned with Janklow was I couldn't get him to call people back very often, but I walked around with a notepad and I wrote down whatever he said on a topic that seemed quotable. Then when a reporter called and wanted to talk to him, I could say, well, I don't know if I can get him to call you back, but here's what he said, and I'll tell you when he said it, and it worked well.
Lori Walsh:
Oh, that's interesting.
Bob Mercer:
Yeah. And he was fine with that. So, I thought we had one of the best press operations in America for a governor's office at that time, and that was 25 years ago. But we put out news releases. We would do call-ins where if he wanted to announce something, we would arrange an open call-in for reporters. So, at 10 o'clock or 9:30 in the morning, we would have an open line and they'd call in and he would answer all their questions. I mean, he'd make some kind of announcement and then answer the questions about that announcement. And then if he had time and you wanted to ask him about something else off-topic, you could, I mean, he loved to talk.
And we put out something, the weekly planner, we called it news tips so that you knew what was coming in the week ahead, not only from the governor's office, but throughout state government. We got other department secretaries to do the call-ins as well. They were reluctant at first, but once they saw they weren't going to get their heads bit off, they were okay with it.
And then we also put out what were called issue papers. We would take something complicated like say the school aid formula and we would explain it and it would take multiple pages to explain because it's a highly intricate thing.
But then we didn't have to walk through it with every reporter every time, and so we could refer them, we'd say, look at the issue brief on the school aid formula, and then call back if you have some more questions. And so we could economize our time better that way and manage our time better that way.
We even figured out simple things like how to get news on the air for a longer period by the timing of when you do the news release. And so if what we did was we would hold a news conference at 9:30 or 9:45 in the morning so that the TV people were on the job, but the radio people, the morning show reporters were through their morning newscast.
And so there's a sweet time right in there where we could get all the print, the TV and the radio people all together, and then we knew that whatever we had to announce would be on the news for the evening and the next morning. And so we understood how to manage a news cycle.
Lori Walsh:
Versus 4:30 p.m. on a Friday.
Bob Mercer:
Yeah, exactly. We didn't do that.
Lori Walsh:
Why is that a thing now?
Bob Mercer:
Well, I think it's a way to get bad news out.
Lori Walsh:
Okay.
Bob Mercer:
Yeah. They think it's going to be ignored. It's going to be overwritten on the weekend, and people aren't paying attention.
I mean, we wanted attention, and Janklow wanted attention, and so that's what we did. And then he wanted me to go to Washington with him. Okay. So, then he decided to run for the US House, and I said, "I don't have any part of this." I just didn't. And that changed everything.
I went in that campaign office exactly twice. Once was the first night when they opened it up and they gave out keys to everybody, and I gave my key back. I just said, "I'm not going to be here." Then the other time I went in, somebody gave me an envelope when I was out and said to get this to Jim Hagan. And so I delivered that message, and then that was it.
Otherwise, I never set foot in there.
Lori Walsh:
What was your worst day on the job? What comes to mind?
Bob Mercer:
Of Janklow?
Lori Walsh:
No, in your career as a reporter or with Janklow?
Bob Mercer:
Well, I quit Janklow at once, so yeah.
Yeah. It was right before the dedication of the World War II Memorial, and what we had worked out was the newspaper association was going to put in all of the papers statewide weeklies and dailies, a preprint that would have the history of South Dakotans in World War II. Janklow wanted to have the last word on what went in there, and I kept sending him the pages or sending him the copy, and it just wasn't getting done.
And so, finally, Jon Hunter over at the Madison Daily Leader who was going to print it was like, "We got to have that. We got to have that Bob." I said, "I can't move it."
And so finally, that was on a Thursday, and I quit.
And on Monday, the Twin Towers got hit and the Pentagon got hit.
Lori Walsh:
Oh.
Bob Mercer:
Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
Oh, wow.
Bob Mercer:
Yeah, and I went back to work.
Yeah. So, anyway, and in the meantime, he had gotten the preprint done.
Yeah. But it was a sad dedication of a World War II Memorial. Yeah.
Lori Walsh:
Wow.
Bob Mercer:
Times changed. 9/11 changed so much in America and throughout the world. I mean, right down to, I mean, it changed our Capitol. The Capitol used to be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You signed a note, just signed a book that you were there if you were there on Saturdays or Sundays.
Now they lock all the doors. You can only come in during business hours through one set of doors. You go through a metal detector. There are cameras everywhere now. The legislative process changed too during that time. But yeah, we now have an iron eight-foot-high fence around the governor's mansion to keep people away who shouldn't be there or might be there. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, we now have a security who travel with the governor.
Lori Walsh:
Right.
Bob Mercer:
Anywhere he or she goes. And yeah, lots of things have changed because of that.
