Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 11, 2003
We're having a little environmental control problem in Tallahassee these days.
The governor and other public officials we see every day want to control their environment by determining when -- and sometimes which -- reporters will be allowed to see and hear what they are doing.
The governor's staff says they want "a controlled environment," so they strictly limited access to Bush for a recent round of interviews looking ahead to the new year.
Sometimes access is so controlled that press aides start saying "one more question" about the time reporters have asked the first question. Gone are the days when a public official faced reporters and answered all the questions we had. Instead they flee the room with reporters at their heels trying to get the answer to one last question.
Sometimes their flight makes them look like mobsters running from a camera.
Increasingly, the aides surrounding a public official work hard to filter information and script the questions and responses.
They don't like hard or unexpected questions, and these days those aides are more likely to be partisan campaign operatives than former journalists or specialists interested in getting information out to Floridians.
They see their jobs as making their employer look good -- not informing the public.
God forbid that we should find an official in a candid moment. Or know his initial thoughts on an issue.
It is also becoming harder to talk to an expert in any state office.
Once upon a time a reporter could call the governor's lawyer or budget director or his expert on tourism and get an informed answer.
These days a call to the governor's general counsel will produce a response from his press office, kindly offering to help us get an answer to the question. The answer will be slightly scripted and very pretty, but it may tell us nothing we really wanted to know and doesn't allow a follow-up.
Call the budget director to ask a complex question about the budget and the same thing happens.
Call an obscure bureaucrat in a state agency miles from the Capitol and -- you guessed it -- a press aide calls back instead of the guy who knows the answer.
This not only builds delay into getting any question answered. It means the answer you get has been filtered to look better.
Sometimes the answer is simply wrong. (Like the time the governor's staff said he would not discuss a Department of Corrections issue, unaware that the governor was quite freely discussing it with reporters who caught him in the hall.) This could spell trouble for public officials who get too accustomed to having someone filter every thought.
Imagine what happens when that public official runs into a reporter on an airplane or in a Capitol hallway and gets hit with a tough question.
An official who has never had to think on his feet might look pretty stupid under those circumstances.
Having to answer tough questions tends to make you think about the answer more than you might if you've grown accustomed to having someone else take the hard questions.
Some are likely to learn that government is not always a "controlled environment." Things leak out despite the best efforts to keep them secret.
It also seems that everyone with a sense of humor has left the building. The people running the Capitol these days take themselves way too seriously.
I am more mindful of this because I recently reread some of the news stories we wrote during past administrations.
When we wrote about a legal issue, we talked to the general counsel.
When we wanted to talk about the budget, we asked the budget director and learned firsthand about the intricacies of financing what the state decides to do.
It made us think there was more than one person in the Capitol who could -- and would -- answer a question.