VICKSBURG — Most of the state’s larger newspapers printed a detailed series of articles on government secrecy in Mississippi, both the legal and the illegal varieties, last week. There has been television and radio news reporting on the same topic.
The effort was conducted under the auspices of the Mississippi Center for Freedom of Information, of which I am a board member. It came to fruition because Stan Tiner, executive editor of The Sun Herald in Biloxi, presented the idea last fall and served as the driving force. Emily Pettus of The Associated Press and Anita Lee of The Sun Herald did most of the heavy lifting. It was the largest shared journalistic undertaking during my 30 years of newspapering in Mississippi. Contrary to popular myth, we team up very rarely.
The idea, however, was not to provide the press an opportunity to whine about laws that make our jobs more difficult than we think they need to be.
The idea was to explain to people how the “none of your business” attitudes that prevail in many public entities hold the whole state back.
Any reporter who thinks a public official will gladly furnish the paperwork that will place his or head on the chopping block for misfeasance or malfeasance is about as naive as an attorney who expects a witness in a criminal trial to up and confess on the stand. In the days of black-and-white TV, Perry Mason got those confessions once a week. Attorneys can practice their whole careers and never have a Perry Mason moment.
Similarly, journalism done well is hard work. It’s not enough to be able to attend meetings or get copies of documents. They have to be mined with perspective and understanding in a search for relevance to a community’s interests. In turn, that information has to be relayed cogently and with depth.
Openness, however, is not only about intrepid reporters ferreting out waste, scandal or injustice. It’s a basic quality-of-life topic. It’s about setting a tone for daily life. It’s about whether elected and appointed officials tell people what they want people to know or whether people have a seat at the table and can decide for themselves what’s relevant.
The roots of government secrecy go back to the era of monarchs and persist today with despots who still rule many nations. The premise is that anything a king or dictator does is fine, because their power is absolute.
The roots of government openness trace to before 1776, but became whole in the Declaration of Independence. That document says the only way for a legitimate government to exist is through a collective grant of authority from the people. It follows that the public’s consent to be governed can’t be valid if the people don’t know or can’t know what government is doing.
Now it may seem there’s a big gap between such lofty rhetoric and discovering, say, that a police chief in Mississippi has three cell phones and is billing his town a couple of hundred dollars a month for each one. But there’s not. The principle is the same. Every day in every way what local boards, councils and commissions and their counterparts at the state level do has an increasingly direct impact on each of us. Though some think their accountability stops when elected or appointed, that’s when it starts. The idea that government need only tell the people what government thinks the people need to know is poison. In recent years far too few members of the Legislature have been willing to stand up and say that.
Rather than expand on the detailed examples cited in the secrecy series, let me just issue this challenge: Look around. Where you find administrations and leaders who keep the doors open, you will see healthy, progressive work being done on the public’s behalf. Where you see arrogance and skulking, you can pretty much bet incompetence, nonsense or worse are carrying the day.
I am at odds with many of my colleagues who think changing laws is the solution. I think better statutes would help, but the far greater good would come from changing minds. It would help Mississippi at all levels if a new breeze of openness would sweep over us. Yes, we’d still bicker. Yes, we’d still have divisions. But the benefits of being known as a state where voters don’t just matter on election days would be tremendous. And believe it or not, some of our problems might be easier to solve.
For those who missed it, or would like to review portions, all installments of the series are on the Internet at www.mcfoi.org. You might want to join as a member, too, or download the organization’s guide to open meetings and records in Mississippi.
