On Sept. 30, several Chronicle news writers attended a journalism conference at Brigham Young University in Provo. Let me tell you, it’s fun to occasionally visit the School Down South to see how they do things.
I learned a lot about the BYU campus that Friday, including something particularly alarming: The state Legislature is trying to hide information from the public.
Regarding the campus, I noticed that BYU has a lot of nice grass-and no goat paths, which is not surprising at a school that kicks men out of class for not shaving and posts signs that read, “If you see the thigh, the slit’s too high.”
I liked that every building had a sculpture in front of it. I hated, however, that I couldn’t find anyone who didn’t look as though his or her ancestry was northern European.
I loved that the BYU newsroom has flat-screen computers, flat-screen TVs, stylized work stations and two faculty members in glass-walled cubicles who baby-sit the editors, yet the Daily Universe still came in second to The Chronicle as best student paper in the region.
It just goes to show, money can’t buy quality.
It seems that also goes for politics.
In the final hour of the conference, there was a panel discussion on the Government Records Access and Management Act task force with Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, along with a media lawyer and a communication professor from Weber State University.
The Utah Legislature is currently trying to restrict the media’s access to government records, they said. If it succeeds, it will set a precedent for restricting the freedom of the press.
Few people know what GRAMA is. It says that all government records are automatically public unless officials have good reason to keep them private.
That means U students are allowed to know what everyone on campus is paid and how many arrests campus police make every month. They’re even allowed to read e-mails sent by and to President Michael Young.
We journalists rely on this right to monitor government in behalf of the public. We don’t appreciate officials who prefer secrecy, and many do-even here on campus.
Last week, I was told to leave a meeting between fraternity and sorority presidents and SLC police. Last semester, I was denied permission to inspect the vice president of diversity’s work schedule.
This GRAMA task force wants to end the public’s right to view e-mails of government officials. It wants professional journalists to begin paying for copies of government records.
E-mail access should not be restricted because almost every kind of document and communication can be transferred and stored via e-mail. That means officials could hide anything they wanted from the public by turning it into e-mail.
Journalists shouldn’t pay for copies because we do research in behalf of all citizens.
If news agencies did pay, it would significantly limit the number of investigations. Student papers wouldn’t be able to investigate at all, community papers would only be able to investigate a little, and The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret Morning News would investigate significantly less than they do.
Everyone should be concerned about the workings of this task force. Government secrecy at any level, from the Associated Students of the University of Utah to the Oval Office, is a threat to democracy.
