A failure to communicate: California government cuts back press access
Like so much else about California, its state government is large: A $300 billion budget. More than 230 departments and agencies. More than 234,000 employees.
Keeping the public apprised of everything that’s happening in that massive bureaucracy requires its own small army of communications staff, who craft messages, write press releases and answer questions from journalists covering everything from the governor to welfare programs, prisons to water policy.
Lately, however, the information isn’t flowing as freely — raising transparency concerns among the press corps that acts as a watchdog for Californians.
Last month, the Capitol Correspondents Association of California, which represents journalists who cover the state Capitol and advocates for improved press access, distributed guidelines to its members about how to handle some of the increasingly common hurdles they encounter, including government agencies asking for questions in advance and refusing to attribute information to their spokespeople.
Ashley Zavala, president of the correspondents association who covers state government and politics for Sacramento television station KCRA, said the extraordinary step was prompted by years of complaints from Capitol press about problems reporting on Gov. Gavin Newsom, his administration and the Legislature. These have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, which accelerated a shift to digital communication that has transformed how the state government discloses its work.
“The pandemic did cause some bad behavior,” Zavala said. “It let some of these agencies and some of these offices get lackadaisical in how they handled the media.”
Many of the standard features of government beat reporting — including in-person press conferences, with an opportunity for follow-up questions, and media phone lines where journalists could talk to a live staffer — disappeared three years ago with the shutdown orders and have been slow to return, if at all.
Changes that reporters and public information officers adopted to do their jobs virtually in a strange new stay-at-home world became ingrained, encouraging practices, such as written statements instead of interviews, that offer less clarity and greater distance between state government and the people it serves.
This tension — between journalists seeking accountability and a bureaucracy that does not always welcome scrutiny — is not new. Covering state government has grown more difficult in recent years with fewer reporters covering the Capitol and social media offering politicians new ways to reach constituents and voters without speaking to the press. Those trends were exacerbated by restrictions applied during the pandemic.
The risk is a decline of “open, honest and transparent communication” essential to the functioning of democracy, said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for a free press and government disclosure.
Media outlets across the state note rejected interview requests, challenges obtaining public records or the lack of any official response in their stories:
- For a Los Angeles Times series over the past year about the broken promises of recreational cannabis legalization, the Department of Cannabis Control refused to provide information about complaints filed by exploited workers, ignored questions about policies for handling allegations of labor trafficking, and sought to block the release of satellite imagery mapping illegal cultivations, and the Department of Industrial Relations did not answer questions about delayed wage theft investigations .
- On the Friday afternoon before the New Year’s holiday, the Department of Health Care Services sent out a notice walking back changes to its bidding process for insurers under Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for poor people. A CalMatters reporter followed up with questions about why the department changed course, whether it was related to a possible lawsuit by insurance providers left out of the process and when patients would be notified. The department said its “statement speaks for itself” until after the holiday, but never responded when the reporter followed up.
- Sacramento television station KCRA aired a story last year about criminal groups skimming food benefits and welfare funds at ATMs, for which the Department of Social Services did not respond to questions about fraud prevention efforts.
- Ahead of the end of California’s COVID-19 state of emergency last month, a CalMatters reporter asked the Department of Public Health for an interview to discuss widening racial and ethnic gaps in vaccination rates and the state’s long-term strategy for managing the coronavirus. The department did not respond until after the story was published, in a written statement which acknowledged, “We know we missed your deadline, but hopefully this information is still useful and of value for you!”
- Multiple news outlets, including CalMatters and the Los Angeles Times, covered the Department of Education’s highly unusual rollout of long-delayed state test scores last October. It included holding a short briefing for reporters before providing them with any of the results and then releasing the data on a Sunday morning, embargoed for the next day, severely limiting their opportunity to reach school officials to discuss the scores before they became public. A department spokesperson said their timeline was constrained because they wanted to release the state scores alongside results from another federal exam.
- The Department of Public Health turned down numerous interview requests and often refused to answer specific questions for a series of stories in 2021 by CalMatters, online news site LAist and San Diego radio station KPBS about failures in state oversight of nursing home, including allowing a nursing assistant to stay on the job for more than three years after he was accused of sexually assaulting a patient.
“These message control practices do real harm to the public interest,” Loy said. “Because the people need to know the full story, not just the official story.”
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