Chipping away at democracy,
one surrender at a time
Bulls are wreaking havoc in governmental china shops these days — both nationally and hereabouts. And a lot of the reasons coming out of the bulls’ mouths seem better suited to coming out of their other ends.
Take, for example, Abilene’s decision last week to designate three official city newspapers, at least one of which isn’t a newspaper at all.
The official reason was that the city’s actual newspaper, the Reflector-Chronicle, switched from printing five days a week to two. To ensure timely publication, officials claimed, they needed other options.
Bull! The council there meets every other week. Notices are published after meetings. Whether a paper prints one, two, five, or seven times a week after each council meeting doesn’t matter. It merely needs to print once for the council to have timely publication.
Citing timeliness as its fake reason, Abilene decided to declare the newspaper’s website a second official newspaper. That, at least, preserved independent publication of notices but did nothing to ensure that notices were fixed in tangible form, immune to change by hidden keystrokes of hackers and unscrupulous officials.
Worse yet, the city’s third supposed newspaper will be its own website — which, like most city websites, including many in Marion County, is frequently out of date and subject not only to repeated hacking but also to the will of unscrupulous officials, like when Marion left out in reprinting a charter ordinance that taxpayers would lose the right to vote on bond issues.
Abilene claims it has the authority to do all this because legislation treats different classes of cities differently regarding official newspapers.
Bull! In truth, there are no differences. The phrasing varies a tad by class, but all cities are required to designate an official newspaper covering general news in the community, mailed at least 50 times a year, and having at least 50% of its circulation paid for.
That’s the law. It’s the same for all classes of city, meaning it’s not subject to being vetoed by a home-rule charter ordinance.
Home rule free-for-all
Since 1961, Kansas law has allowed home-rule vetoing of state laws that treat cities differently, but only in the past few years have politically motivated hangers-on like bond attorneys and the League of Municipalities begun pushing that law to its breaking point.
Most recently, an anti-media politician asked the anti-media attorney general’s office — the same one that a federal judge once lectured about not knowing the law — to come up with a bogus excuse allowing this.
That excuse ignores countless other sections of law that don’t differ by class of city and thus aren’t subject to local veto.
Throughout Kansas law, cities are required to publish notices in THE official city newspaper. Designating three places where a notice might appear is like designating none.
Imagine you want to leave a note for someone in your household to pick up a half-gallon of milk at the store. If you have one place to post the note — on your refrigerator door, for example — it probably will be seen. If you add two others — the bottom drawer of your hope chest or behind the bandages in the bathroom medicine cabinet — it’ll likely be missed. Others won’t know to check all three places and don’t regularly get into some of them for other reasons.
That’s why the law wants things to be in THE official paper. People pay for it, so they look at it. And they will run across notices without having to look for them, just as they used to see them when they were posted on a big tree in the town square, where most people walked by.
A web of deceit
The legislature also makes it clear it doesn’t regard government websites as newspapers. Another law, applying equally to all cities and thus not subject to local veto, gives cities the ability to publish a summary of long notices in their official city newspaper and post the full text on their city website. Clearly, the legislature understood that city websites aren’t newspapers.
The move to get notices out of newspapers has nothing to do with whether print is dying and online is the future. That might be true, but print automatically includes online. And online doesn’t include print even though between 15% and 25% of Kansas residents still have no access to online notices, according to the latest Census Bureau numbers. And even if they did, who has the time to check every day to see whether a city has posted something new?
Controlling the media
Clearly, the real motivation is something else. The Record caught wind of this in texts uncovered by Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into whether police illegally raided our newsroom in 2023.
In one message before the raid, Marion’s city administrator at the time was talking about how he was looking into alternatives to publishing notices in the Record because he didn’t like our aggressive coverage of stupid or illegal actions by the city and wanted to punish us for it.
A private business can decide to boycott a newspaper because it doesn’t like what news it covers, but government can’t. It violates the First Amendment for government to use its financial clout to influence press freedom.
Still, governments from city councils and school boards to various county, state, and federal agencies desperately seek to control the entirety of the message that goes out about what they do.
They create social media channels, publish newsletters, post videos, run electronic kiosks, and do whatever else they can to try to make themselves the sole source of information voters get about what they do. And this happens not just in the White House but also in City Hall.
Imagine coming home some night to turn on the TV and hear: “Live and direct from New York, it’s the CBS Evening News with anchorman Donald Trump.” On the other channel, it’s: “Welcome to NBC Nightly News with chief correspondent Nancy Pelosi.” Or, “This is ABC World News Tonight, reporting from Washington, Mitch McConnell.” Maybe National Public Radio will turn “All Things Considered” over to Bernie Sanders.
Too much satire? Not really. Tune in MCTV-20 (if you can find it) in Marion and you’ll see supposed news programs for which city officials and employees exercise full editorial control.
Death blows to democracy
George Orwell appears to have been only 40 years off when he wrote in “1984” about government trying to control thought by transforming media into controlled venues that provide only “positive” pro-government news, create echo chambers about hot-button issues, and avoid accountability for whatever government does.
The brazen nature of government trying to control all information about it is highlighted by it refusal to strengthen open meetings and open records laws and make it incredibly hard to obtain such things as police body camera video.
Yes, readers in Abilene have a right to be disgusted that their once-proud local newspaper now has distant owners who have slashed its news staff and sold off its building. That’s how it got onto the hit list of towns vulnerable to attempts by hangers-on like the League of Municipalities and bond attorneys to do away with notices in local newspapers. They even admitted there was such a list when they pushed through a similar move in Hillsboro a few months back.
Yes, notices published in newspapers cost money, but it’s less than many government offices spend on bottled water for their employees.
Give these hangers-on a big enough foothold, and they’ll go after not only towns without strong, locally owned newspapers but also the rest of the media as well.
The only way to stop them is for citizens to object to local officials about trying to control every message and to lawmakers to close the legal loopholes the hangers-on urge them to sneak through.
Otherwise, one of these days the only editorials you’ll be reading are about how wonderful government is.
Some might think that would leave us in the benign black-and-white world of “Pleasantville,” but it also could leave us in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, George Orwell’s “1984,” or Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Emasculating the media is the first step in any authoritarian coup.
— ERIC MEYER