Guest Author
In these days of warring ideologies, red vs. blue, it’s comforting to know that officeholders from either party can agree on something. Too bad it’s the wrong thing, keeping secrets from the public.
The pages of our newspapers are not big enough to record the daily violations of our open-government laws, so the public only gets to learn about the high profile cases.
But every day, at every level of government, records are denied, meetings are closed, twisted arguments are made to keep the public in the dark.
The latest high-visibility open-records case involves Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi, who are accused in a lawsuit filed Monday, of using private email accounts to conceal communications that should have been covered by the Sunshine laws. Attorney Steven Andrews claims he’s been denied records he has sought for months.
It will be months before the issue is settled, so even if Andrews wins, he loses — as does the public. Records withheld are records denied.
This isn’t the first time the Scott administration has had a run-in over e-mailed records. Even before his inauguration, e-mailed policy conversations were falling into a black hole. An investigation concluded that the e-mails were not purposely withheld but there was no certainty all the e-mails had been recovered.
The letter of the law, in these cases, is less an issue than its spirit, which is that the public’s business should be done in the public and that documents generated by public officials belong — unambiguously — to the public.
Few politicians openly dispute that principle. On the contrary, most ardently embrace it, even run on it. Yet most of them succumb at some point in their careers to the allure of secrecy.
Barack Obama is a good example. His rhetoric in support of transparency was enough to make a reporter’s heart flutter. Endless and petty freedom of information disputes would be a thing of the past, idealists hoped.
Wrong. The Obama administration is a lot like everyone that preceded it. Getting some public records is a lot like a knife fight — ugly and bloody.
You don’t have to go to the White House or the governor’s mansion to face a stone wall. If you want real opposition to openness, just stop by your town hall where the first line of resistance is a clerk who thinks the records are his or hers to protect. The presumption is the public must prove that the record being sought is open, not the other way around.
In most cases that kind of opposition is based on ignorance of the law, not a willful resistance to it. That’s more the purview of the higher ups and elected officials because they have more to lose by an embarrassing disclosure hidden in, say, a memo or an e-mail.
For many years — most of the last 50 — reporters and newspapers were public record hawks. Newspapers had big staffs who showed up at city hall regularly and did battle in behalf of the public. And when the only way to break loose a record was a lawsuit, the newspaper called on a whip-smart First Amendment lawyer to file a suit, which is why most of the case law in support of transparency had a newspaper’s name on it.
That was then. Today, newspaper staffs are thin and getting thinner. And the legal action budget is thinner still. The forces of darkness are stronger these days and the opposition is weaker.
Unless the public steps up and reporters work more overtime, we’re in for some dark days.
