Newstradamus

Angel Boligan/El Universal

The Sacramento Bee stirred up quite a reaction last week after it posted an online database that makes it easy to look up the salary of any state employee.

The first reaction: Angry state workers charged that the release of the information (which is public record and available to any citizen upon request) is an invasion of privacy. Editor Melanie Sill, in her column, explained her newspaper's rationale.

The second reaction: Millions of taxpayers found the data VERY interesting — setting a Bee record for page views in just a couple of days, and paralyzing the newspaper's online comment feature for a while.

Was the Bee right to right to make the salaries available? It was part of a larger story about the escalation of state pay raises and the growing gap between those who make the most money and those making the least.

This most recently flared into the news when the huge raises being given to top administrators of the California State University system were revealed at a time when budgets and programs are being slashed at schools such as Humboldt State.

A column Sunday by the Bee's public editor, Armando Acuna, noted that the reaction was no doubt accelerated by the fact the 16 percent of the capital city's workforce are state employees. Which makes it all the more important of a story for the Bee to cover.

Acuna disagreed with demands from workers, spurred by state unions, that the site be taken down. He also disagreed with the argument that the newspaper should not have made the data so available — that those who want to know should “do the homework” and find their way through the bureaucracy.

Acuna rightly noted that it's a newspaper's job to gather and disseminate information, not make it hard to find. In fact, he said, other online search tools can turn up much more information about most anyone than the Bee's salary database.

At the core of the controversy, said Acuna, is this: “If you work for the government, you are a public employee, with all that entails. You are paid by taxpayers, who are entitled to know how much you are paid, not in some abstract way but in real dollars and cents. That's the deal. You know that going in. There's no bait-and-switch here.”

Each community sees such coverage through a unique lens. I am curious what the reaction would be in Humboldt County if the Times-Standard were to link to a county salary database, teacher pay, or other lists such as permits to carry concealed weapons? Share your thoughts with me, if you like.

Posted by Rich Somerville at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Some think it should be illegal for new organizations to publish information not received via "official" sources, and in many totalitarian countries it is. In Britain, the news media are prohibited from publishing or airing any story about a legal case until it has gone completely through the court process, which of course can take years.

In the ostensibly democratic United States, freedom of information laws can't prevent government agencies from withholding information that is supposed to be available to any citizen, not just the press. Periodically, the California First Amendment Coalition checks to see if officials are obeying the law. They teamed up with the Society for Professional Journalists and sent university students out to ask for public records at more than 130 local government agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties.

The survey revealed that "local California agencies turned down initial requests for records 77 percent of the time. Law enforcement officials were the worst violators of the law, managing to deny 80 percent of legitimate requests." In one case, a police department demanded that a requester sign an affadavit stating she had never been arrested within the department's jurisdiction.

A similar survey in Humboldt County would be a good idea. It would not be surprising to find a similar percentage of denials.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota this week, another example of what happens when law enforcement agencies try to make up their own laws. A TV reporter working on a story was denied access by St. Paul police to a seven-year-old traffic arrest report — a public document — so he got a copy from a county employee. The police obtained an administrative subpoena (from a DA, not a judge) to seize the reporter's cell phone records in an effort to identify the employee who had the effrontery to obey the law.

The TV station's lawyers think this is not only a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution, but of state law as well. According to an AP story, University of Minnesota media law and ethics professor Jane Kirtley said Minnesota law makes it very hard for police to force reporters to turn over their notes and sources. But she added, "If you're going to pursue a story the government doesn't want you to pursue, you're going to have to be very prepared for the real possibility that they will take any steps they can to unmask your sources."

Posted by Rich Somerville at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)