The people hired to help journalists reach public officials are instead becoming the barriers who keep them apart.
One of the concerns journalists raised during Thursday’s First Amendment program at Fresno State was a troubling barrier to access: Public officials are increasingly becoming less available to the journalists whose job is to cover them.
Instead, reporters are being told to route their questions through public information officers or communications staff.
That may sound like a minor administrative change. It is not. It can fundamentally alter the relationship between journalists and the government they cover. When every question must pass through a communications office, the public loses access to the people making decisions on its behalf.
Journalists also lose the ability to ask spontaneous follow-up questions, pursue uncomfortable lines of inquiry, or have an unfiltered conversation with the officials they are covering.
The concern is even greater at a time when the number of journalists covering government agencies is shrinking, while many governments are expanding their communications operations and hiring more communications professionals.
The result can be an increasingly uneven balance: Fewer journalists trying to gather information independently, while more government resources are devoted to managing and controlling the flow of that information.
Instead of hard-hitting investigative reporting, controversial issues are increasingly being sanitized by legions of communications professionals.
Public information officers play an important role in helping journalists navigate government and obtain information. But when that role shifts from facilitating access to controlling access, it raises a much larger issue: transparency and the public’s right to know.
Donald Munro, publisher of The Munro Review, has hit the wall at Fresno City Hall. His news site’s hard-hitting coverage of the Measure P funding scandal is being met with silence. City Hall has gone limp when his reporter asks questions of city leaders. That is shameful.
When I was a reporter at The Fresno Bee, PIOs facilitated interviews with public officials. They didn’t act as their surrogates or try to answer questions for them. Reporters asked the questions, and public officials answered them.
That’s how journalism is supposed to work. If you’re covering someone in public office, you should be able to question them directly—not get a carefully managed response filtered through a PIO. There’s a big difference between facilitating access and controlling access.
The First Amendment is not simply about the right to publish. A free press also depends on the ability of journalists to gather information, ask questions, challenge public officials and independently report on the decisions those officials make.
When access is increasingly filtered through communications offices — at the same time that the ranks of journalists are shrinking — the ability of the press to provide meaningful public accountability can be weakened.
That should concern all of us, regardless of our politics. A healthy democracy depends on citizens having access to information and journalists having the ability to independently question the people who exercise public power.
(This column has been updated.)
