Locking up the news
and throwing away the key
Years ago, a top official at the University of Kansas lamented: “We have a nuclear reactor on campus, and we don’t let the students anywhere near it. We have something far more dangerous — a newspaper — and students get to do anything they want with it.”
The official had reason to be perturbed. A few weeks earlier, he had attended what up until then had been a weekly secret meeting with other officials. The University Daily Kansan had fought long and hard to make it an open, public session.
During the meeting, the official blatantly made fun of a widely respected professor by speaking in an overly exaggerated and insulting version of the professor’s ethnic accent. It was something right out of a blackface minstrel show, although in this case the professor had come from India, not Africa. The Kansan reported this, and widespread campus protests ensued.
These days, officials don’t talk about how dangerous they believe newspapers are. They instead dismiss them as “legacy media” that no one reads and can easily be ignored.
They try to control all messages by redacting documents in violation of the law, by conducting public forums to which only selected people are invited, by refusing to answer questions from reporters, and by attempting to bypass news media and speak directly over anti-social media channels with tiny handfuls of followers.
They act as if they can do whatever they want, and news reports are irrelevant, yet they behave as if they still seem to fear what newspapers say.
The latest evidence comes from a surprising place — the state prison system.
No longer will relatives be able to subscribe to hometown newspapers for loved ones serving time in hope of successfully reintegrating with their communities.
Kansas Department of Corrections last week canceled all inmate newspaper subscriptions and imposed a cumbersome new bureaucracy in which inmates would have to make requests — which could be denied — to see hometown papers and pay for them out of their meager inmate spending accounts.
The Constitution is clear. No one can be denied basic rights without due process of law, which didn’t occur in this case, and one of those rights is the implied First Amendment right to stay informed.
Even if that weren’t true, there’s a valid reason to want inmates to stay informed of their communities. Ultimately, they will return there, and knowing more about the community’s development and values helps in the rehabilitation and reintegration process.
Publishers also have a right, reaffirmed by court rulings, to know before their publications are intercepted and rejected by government officials. Otherwise, we live in a Vladimir Putin world in which government gets to decide what news the public that it supposedly serves is allowed to know.
We’re already headed down that path. Kansas law regarding openness in government is seriously outdated.
Instead of blocking for safety reasons the home address of law enforcement officials who haven’t paid their taxes, government cronies block the officials’ names, allowing them to escape responsibility.
Unlike in states that care about the public’s right to know, officials are able to retreat into closed-door sessions at the drop of a hat and without anyone policing whether they have excluded the public for a legally justified reason.
Laws could require, as they do in many states, that executive sessions be recorded so a judge can decide, if someone complains, whether the session legally was closed. The system works in numerous states. But like New Jersey, which insists self-service gasoline stations are too dangerous, Kansas insists that requiring officials to record secret sessions on a cell phone is too oppressive.
Last month, another Kansas town was found to have flouted the state’s open records law by refusing to explain why it wouldn’t hand over requested material. The fine was just $250 — about the same amount that most governments pay for cinnamon rolls for employees when they have morning meetings.
A database of government employee salaries deletes the names of the employees on privacy grounds even though it is black-letter law that salaries paid by the government are public records.
High-ranking government employees are fired — even reportedly for financial shenanigans paid for at taxpayer expense — and the whole thing is covered up under the massively abused “personnel matters of non-elected officials” criterion for secrecy.
Instead of addressing problems like these, legislators and local officials seem intent on trying to figure out loopholes to keep them from having to publish official notices in legitimate newspapers.
What, exactly, are they wanting to hide? And if they’re successful, will any of us who pay their bills even know what it is?
Many officials hate newspapers not because they’re “legacy media” but because of an old saying: There are two ways to destroy the reputation of a politician — misquote him or quote exactly what he says.
— ERIC MEYER