“Blogs?”
Posted March 30th, 2008 at 12:25 PM by Jeff A. TaylorThat telling entry in the notes of an Easley administration PR flack points to the importance of preserving — and disseminating to the public — the content of policy-related electronic records used by government decision makers.
There is now no doubt that officials in the governor’s office moved to destroy emails rather than leave a trail of “sensitive” information available to — whom?
Bloggers.
Says so clear as day in press officer Julia Jarema’s notes of a May 29 staff meeting. Take a look:
Public records request — increasing careful w/ email
- delete emails to / from the gov. office — everyday
- blog fodder — if sensitive type, print and delete
Very interesting. Blog fodder — if sensitive, type, print and delete. Damn skippy. If you have something to hide.
And what was blog fodder in May 2007? The sentencing of Jim Black and Kevin Geddings, for one. The investigation into state Rep. Thomas Wright saw subpoenas issued as the SBI kicked off a criminal investigation of the Wilmington Democrat. A couple weeks before that, it was Don Carrington reporting funky coastal land deals by Easley and friends. All coincidence? I think not.
Recall that shortly before the staff meeting on destroying emails, Easley tried to go on something of an ethics offensive with regard to Wright, pointing to a paper trail that either had to match up or not.
Some where there is a hard drive with bits on it that does not match up with what the public has been told. Let’s go find it.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
As far as I’m concerned, “blog fodder” is the phrase of the month.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
What does it say about the effectiveness of the alt-media (blogger) community that they are seemingly more feared than the traditional press?
As far as I am concerned, the entire state government’s e-mail and paper records should be secured against ALL deletion from this point on. Easley’s hand-waving explanation that some records are “ephemeral” is absolute BS: They’re only ephemeral if you delete them, bozo. There is no natural “expiration date” on e-mails or handwritten or printed memos.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:15 am
Secured against deletion??? Clayj, do you realize that could cost an extra couple of gigabytes of data storage per year? Add that together year after year after year, and you could be talking about wasting an extra $50 worth of hard drive space. You know how this governor is about waste and unnecessary expense? You are talking crazy talk.
You do have to feel for those old political PR guys. Imagine the old days when you could just call up your buddy down at the Times and get him to quash that story about the Prez and the actress just by asking. Or you could call your buddy Dan’l and say, “Hey, we need an embarrassing story about the other guy so our schlub doesn’t look so bad.” And he’d make one up if he had to.
Being a Democratic strategist in a world of bloggers and cameramen who save every inch of tape must be a lot like having a career as a typewriter repairman. Nothing is familiar anymore and what’s the world coming to when you can’t even pass off a good but fake war story about your mundane trip to Bosnia of all places.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:58 am
This not very complicated. Say to state employees are shooting around a spread sheet with Medicaid re-embursement numbers on it, or something. I think Fern Shubert pointed this out, if not it sounds like something she would notice, but anyway — suppose Hospital A was supposed to give $50K back to the state for some reason. They dispute that — perhaps for valid reasons, perhaps because they’ve got a good lobbyist, or have a state senator in their pocket, or the board member is a big Easley contributor — whatever. The dispute is resolved with a $25K number as the new amount owed.
The public needs to know that. We need both the attachments and the quick little — “did you get the new Med calcs?” “yep. OK” — back-and-forth.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Fern Shubert and John Rhodes discovered as elected officials in the NC General Assembly, corruption was rampant! A few have gone to jail, but these honest folks know that only the tip of the iceberg of
corruption has been revealed so far!
Is there a conservative in Char-Meck that trusts local, state, or federal government????
March 31st, 2008 at 9:50 pm
FWIW, I had the opportunity this weekend to have a good talk with the former publisher of a major North Carolina newspaper. One question I had for him: Why is it that most daily newspapers now are completely toothless? His answer was in two parts:
First, most daily newspapers (the Charlotte Observer, the News & Observer, etc.) are now owned by publicly-traded companies like McClatchy, and there is huge pressure to cut costs and raise profit margins to levels that would have been unthinkable in the old days. This need to save money results in them not doing the sort of tough investigative work that used to be their specialty, and turning instead into PR flacks for local government and whoever else will give them money (in the form of ad revenues).
Second, and more telling, he told me that most daily newspapers now are absolutely mortified at the thought of alienating anyone for fear of losing subscribers/readers. This results in a totally vanilla presentation, devoid of content and filled with shiny, happy stuff that distracts from the fact that there’s no real news being reported. Sure, we get the occasional good story, like the Easley e-mail story, but the reality is that this story will likely do nothing to Easley as his final term’s about up anyway.
Only small papers, like the Rhino Times and Creative Loafing, have the resources to pursue stories that they really care about… because they keep minimal staff and make most of their money back through ads (a market which the dailies have mostly lost, especially in classified ads), the weeklies can devote additional resources to hard investigative journalism.
And the bloggers, of course, have the biggest edge of all, since they are largely hobbyists who investigate and write because they want to, not because it’s their job. They have virtually no expenses, they definitely have an agenda (and aren’t afraid to say so), and through the Internet they have an audience.
So yeah, it actually does make sense that Easley and other weasels like him should fear bloggers.