As little as 10 years ago it was not unusual for a reporter from even a community weekly paper like the Cowichan Valley Citizen to call up the provincial government and talk to a minister.
Oh, how the times have changed.
First, journalists found themselves shunted off more and more often to professional mouthpieces. Note that it’s difficult to ask the hard questions to hold someone to account when you are speaking to them through a third party, who has to stop the interview and go check with someone, or several someones, before they can answer any kind of unexpected follow-up question.
Now, more and more, we are denied any kind of human contact at all.
The norm is increasingly becoming that journalists are required to send in an email list of their questions to a ministry, and, if we are lucky, we get a fairly timely email back with a written response. Our favourite is when we are told that the statements in that email should be attributed not to an individual who is being quoted, but to the ministry in general. So nobody is really responsible. Talk about a culture of fear.
That’s not to say that all departments are like that, and we’ve certainly had contact with some phenomenal public relations gurus over the years who are excellent at their jobs. The good ones see their role as facilitating our access to information, pointing us in the right direction, not shielding it from us as if we were the enemy.
But the good ones seem to be increasingly in short supply — we imagine official policy has something to do with it, rather than it being the fault of those on the job.
So why should the general public be concerned? After all, tracking down information is part of what we get paid for as journalists, and why should you care if it’s easy or not?
We consider ourselves a conduit of information, representatives of the public that our government is supposed to be serving. If we cannot get information, even with credentials behind us, what chance does the ordinary person have?
Problems with the freedom of information system in recent years have been well documented.
It’s troubling that prying loose information about what our elected officials, and the bureaucracy they oversee, are doing has become ever more time-consuming and costly.
Waiting for a request to be processed can take ages and even then there’s no guarantee that what you wanted will be released to you.
It seems obvious that in some cases they’re hoping you’ll just give up in defeat. That’s not how it is supposed to work.
We need to do better.
