California has at least 35 million human beings residing inside its borders, nearly two-thirds of them potential voters.
Gray Davis has been a California politician for three decades and the state's governor for the last 4 1/2 years, but has engaged in personal conversation with, at most, a few thousand of his constituents.

During Davis' first couple of years as governor, he enjoyed fairly strong public approval ratings, 60-plus percent in most polls. Californians may not have had much personal contact with their governor, nor considered him to be charming, but they had no reason to dislike him either, based on what they knew of him.

Davis' popularity began a sharp slide two years ago, as the state was hammered by an unexpected, scary energy crisis, and it has continued to decline ever since. It was just over 40 percent when he won a close re-election in November, but plummeted to a record-low level, just over 20 percent in most polls, shortly thereafter. And now Davis faces the prospect of becoming the first California governor to be recalled.

The polls that chart Davis' decline uniformly reveal that Californians, especially voters, see their governor as devoted to his own political career, especially the extraction of campaign money from special interest pleaders; neglectful of the state's affairs; and untrustworthy.

As mentioned earlier, only an infinitesimal number of those who hold negative views of Davis have actually engaged in conversations with him. So why have they turned against him so strongly? The answer is to be found in Davis' relationship with an even smaller substratum of Californians: a few dozen men and women who report, analyze and comment on state politics in the pages of major California newspapers.

By what they write, these journalists create what Davis' one-time boss, former Gov. Jerry Brown, once characterized as the "media weather." At any moment, Brown mused, the media weather could be balmy or stormy, but whatever its condition, the politician must endure it. And for the last two years, coinciding precisely with Davis' decline in the polls, his media weather has been very adverse.

The tone of Davis' newspaper coverage turned negative two years ago during the energy crisis, when he was portrayed -- accurately -- as waffling over how to deal with the sudden shortages of electric power, the steep spikes in power costs and the rapidly deteriorating condition of the state's investor-owned utilities. And it has continued, unabated, during the budget crisis. What was written about Davis in major newspapers reverberated in smaller print outlets, among the state's radio and television broadcasters and, eventually, in the national political media.

Davis' managerial failings have been catalogued in unrelenting detail, along with his lavish fund raising from special interests, administration actions that appeared to favor those interests, and his ever-shifting positions on policy matters. And during that two-year period, there has been virtually no positive coverage of Davis and his administration. This is not to say that the media were out to get Davis. The reportage, overwhelmingly, has been accurate and the critical commentary well-reasoned.

Davis came across to readers as shallow and leadership-challenged because, in fact, that's exactly how he has acted.

Given that journalistic record, it's not at all surprising that Californians view Davis in such negative terms since they are utterly dependent on the media for their understanding of his governorship. The governor with the worst-ever media weather has the worst-ever approval rating.

When the history of this recall drive is written, no matter how it turns out, a very large chapter should be devoted to Davis' mutually disdainful relationship with the political media. It should be a case study in how not to govern in the media age: feeding journalists a steady diet of cheesy media events, mindless, fact-free cheerleading by sycophants and Davis' own pre-digested sloganeering, and expecting that they and their readers would be fooled. Davis' dealings with the media have been as content-free as the rest of his administration, and he's paying a very big price.