Keeping Covered in a New Climate

RALEIGH--The importance of a free and effective press and its role in open, honest government is ingrained in our constitutional principles and our national culture. My first experience and appreciation for this concept occurred nearly 45 years ago as a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill. As a radio-TV-motion pictures major, I had the opportunity to intern for WSOC-TV News in Charlotte, covering the 1965 session of the General Assembly.

Back then, covering state government and particularly the legislature was important business. WSOC sent two reporters to Raleigh to cover the weekly legislative session, plus paying me to haul the camera around, collect copies of bills, take notes at committee meetings and drive the film bag to a local airport for late day delivery to Charlotte.

Through 1968, I continued working with WSOC-TV, covering the General Assembly and doing "stringer" work in between sessions. I saw the Speaker Ban debated and filmed the head of the U.S. Communist Party speak across the stone wall on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. I covered Martin Luther King Jr., as well as Klan rallies, Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon and a host of other politicians. It was a marvelous experience and gave me a great appreciation for the challenges and importance of an aggressive, expansive press corps.

My subsequent career as a lawyer, judge and candidate in numerous elections continued to put me in contact with the press, sometimes in a contentious relationship. However, I never lost my appreciation for the importance of the role the press plays in keeping politicians and government within proper bounds and reporting on the good and the bad that surrounds the democratic process.

All of this leads me to recent comments by WUNC-FM's Laura Leslie. In her posting on the blog Isaac Hunter's Tavern highlighting the end of the recent legislative session she says:

"At my first N.C. Sine Die in 2004, the press corps was 20-something strong. Reporters and photogs fought over scoops, raced each other up the stairs, and went in on pizzas in the wee hours.

This year, at 2 a.m., during the hottest debate of the session, there were eight of us scattered in a press room lined with mostly empty desks. Gary Robertson, AP. Mark Binker, Greensboro. Barry Smith, Freedom. Josh Ellis, Curtis Media. Ben Niolet and Dan Kane, N&O. Scott Mooneyham, Insider. And me. Fewer than one per million people in this state.

"The competitive urge is still there in spades, but it's different these days. We've learned to work together because, after round after round of cuts in the industry, we have to. Cooperation is the only way 8 people can keep tabs on 170 legislators, ad hoc committee meetings, and the dozens of floor amendments that fly by in a 19-hour session."

Compare Leslie's description of the decline of press coverage with my experience of years ago. In 1965 a Charlotte TV station was willing to commit two excellent reporters and an intern to virtually full-time coverage of the General Assembly. As Leslie notes, now, in the waning hours of this session, there were a mere eight reporters present to cover laws that were being added, changed or ignored.

This decline in coverage, not just of the General Assembly but of state and local governments generally, is a troubling dilemma for anyone interested in honest, open government.

A few weeks ago I was complaining to The N&O's editorial page editor about the lack of coverage and comment on an important public records and freedom of the press issue at the heart of a lawsuit recently filed by the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law. The response was in essence, we're doing the best we can with the diminished resources we have. A great editorial finally emerged, but the exchange highlighted what I know must be a growing frustration among members of the press who want to do their job thoroughly but are hamstrung by corporate funding limitations.

I don't know what the solution is, but we all better start viewing our individual and organizational responsibilities as including a "press" role in covering government and politics. The mainstream media might cringe at the thought of bloggers, tweeters and independent groups usurping the traditional responsibility of the media. But it is a new era and we are all in this together.

Secrecy and a lack of transparency can only be effectively challenged by an aggressive and independent press - a press that must be defined more broadly than ever.

Robert Orr, formerly a justice on the state Supreme Court, is director of the N.C. Institute of Constitutional Law.