A Strange Story

Perusing the online DH late this afternoon, I found this story by Jennifer Moody. She's been the DH reporter writing about the Lebanon School Board and related issues.

The story, which basically just announces the fact that the Lebanon Express put in a public records request some time back to the city for the public records of School Board member Debi Shimmin, is one of the strangest things I have seen in a long time. From the story:

LEBANON - Journalists at the Lebanon Express say they asked for phone and e-mail records from two employees at City Hall to investigate allegations that school board business was being conducted on city time.

...

The Express has received a bill for 318 records reviewed in connection with the request. The paper has not yet paid for nor seen the materials.

...

“We received information that led us to believe there may have been communication having to do with the board’s decision to put Jim Robinson on paid leave on city time using city resources,” [Express editor A.K. Dugan] said.

However, she added: “We’re investigating allegations. We don’t know what we’ll find. The allegations may turn out to be all wrong, but nobody knows until we’ve finished with the investigation, until we’ve seen what we requested.”

This is essentially a non-story. Many people know about the public records request; I'm sure it was hot gossip when it happened, and Debi Shimmin made reference to it during the board meeting in which Robinson was reinstated. So it's not really news in that sense. That makes me wonder why it ran in the first place. My guess: Someone, or several someones, complained to either the DH editor or DH publisher about what they perceived as biased coverage, or possibly just complained about the story not being covered, being under the impression that this story is news.

It's also highly unusual to write a story about a public records request, seeing as how they are not that uncommon in journalism circles, do not constitute an investigation and do not, in and of themselves, show any results.

On the other hand, such a request is certainly news in Lebanon, I suppose, just due to the rarity of the event. Still, I'm not convinced it's worth doing a story on - better, perhaps, to include the fact that it happened in the eventual story that reports on the results of the records search.

But what about the story itself? Is there anything we can learn from that? Well, we learn that the Express is going to receive 318 documents. That strikes me as a large number, but since I don't really know much about records requests, that could be par for the course. I do wonder, however, if those documents are going to be redacted (and here I am just running off knowledge of how the federal government has been dealing with FOIA requests in the last few years). In any case, Express reporter Larry Coonrod has his work cut out for him.

Anything else in the story? Yes - Coonrod's statement near the end of the story, for one:

Coonrod, the reporter who asked the city for the records, said when Shimmin joined Rick Alexander and Josh Wineteer in voting to place Robinson on leave, it appeared the three had communicated prior to the meeting and reached a decision about what they would do.

“If the public’s business is not going to be done in public, we’ll use extraordinary measures to make it public,” he said.

This is a very, very touchy statement for me. On the one hand, journalists and print newspapers have long served as a foil for governmental secrecy. There's a long history of that in the United States.

On the other hand, Coonrod's statement can easily be read as an activist's (and not a reporter's) statement - and I'd bet that's how it's going to read to the anti-Robinson crowd. Granted, I get the sense that crowd already doesn't like Coonrod or the Express, but still. This is potentially fuel for the fire. I'm not saying it's wrong (in fact, I love investigative journalism), merely that the tone that comes across in the quote is not as, um, conciliatory as it could have been. It comes across as Coonrod taking sides - not the side of truth and openness, which I suspect is how Coonrod (or any other halfway decent journalist) views it, but the side opposite the anti-Robinson folks.

Let me put it this way: Many people view a reporter's job as simply reporting the news without having an effect on anything, without creating change. That's a false statement - reporters change the terms of the public debate every time they file a story, simply due to the fact that their words become common knowledge. So change is going to happen - but given that many folks are under the impression that a newspaper's job is to report, and not create, the news, the quote is not likely to win Coonrod a lot of friends.

Finally, there is this statement:

Shimmin was the target because of the question about the use of public resources, Dugan said. “We’re not out to get Debi.”

If I'm already suspicious of the Express at this point, then I see this as a confirmation, perhaps, that in fact Debi was and is a target. (This holds particularly true if I were under the impression that someone "threatened" Shimmin to change her vote regarding Robinson.)

Also, if I'm the Express, then this is one of the few legitimate avenues I have to do investigative work. Shimmin's records as a city employee are public - of course the newspaper will do a records request. So in that sense I agree that it's not about Shimmin, but probably about getting any information possible - hence the use of keywords as a filter (anyone know what the keywords are?).

Also, does anyone know what Lebanon charges for this kind of records request? My experience with this sort of thing is that bureaucracies charge so much money as to create a barrier that prevents almost all individuals from doing this - which is, in essence, a barrier to citizen participation in government.