When Institutions Speak Quietly, the Public Conversation Suffers
Obscurity is not neutrality. When public institutions communicate in ways that are difficult to find, harder to understand, and easy to ignore, they are making a choice about who gets to participate.
Public institutions at the center of the accountability question Hartwell examines.
A pattern has emerged in my coverage of regional government over the past several years that I want to describe as precisely as I can, because I think it is more significant than it appears. Public institutions — municipal governments, county agencies, regulatory bodies — have become, in aggregate, more communicative and less transparent. They issue more press releases, post more to websites, hold more formal briefings. And they are, in my experience, harder to understand than they were ten years ago.
This is not a conspiracy. I do not think it is, in most cases, even intentional. It is the product of several intersecting tendencies: the professionalization of public communications, the proliferation of channels, the replacement of substantive disclosure with the performance of accessibility. Institutions that post everything to a website and respond to every press inquiry with a statement have learned, not always cynically, that volume can substitute for clarity.
The Cost of Managed Communication
What is lost is the kind of direct, unmediated exchange that used to be more common between reporters and the officials they covered. I am not nostalgic for some imagined golden age of transparency. But I do believe that when an official declines to answer a question in favor of directing you to a prepared statement, something has been withheld — not necessarily something improper, but something. A decision has been made about what the public is entitled to know and in what form they are entitled to know it.
"The question a reporter should always ask, and that a public official should always expect to be asked, is simple: what would you not like me to find out, and why?"
I raise this not to indict any particular institution or official but to note that the problem is structural and that the remedy is also structural. Public institutions should be required to hold regular, unscripted press availabilities. Officials should answer questions, not redirect them. The public record should be genuinely public — easy to find, easy to understand, complete.
We will keep asking. We expect you to keep answering.