We in Humboldt County know better than most that sunshine isn’t a thing to be taken for granted.
As Sunshine Week — an annual March celebration of the importance of government transparency — comes to a close, we want to add our voice to the chorus that has spent the week championing the principles of open government. But we also want to acknowledge the gathering storm clouds as an administration coils to strike at freedom of the press and obscure its own workings from the people it’s meant to serve.
We at the Journal depend weekly on the California Public Records Act and the Ralph M. Brown Act, which combine to give everyone the right to access government records and ensure the public’s business is conducted in public, not behind closed doors at the direction of unseen hands. These laws are vital to a functioning democracy, designed to ensure the people retain control over the institutions created to serve us. As such, we must protect them, strengthen them and expand them at every turn.
In ordinary times, we might spend the rest of our limited space discussing how to do that — we’ve got lots of ideas, from reducing protections for police records to adding disincentivizing penalties for repeat offenders — but these are not ordinary times.
Nefarious actors who seek to manipulate our government to their personal ends — whether a local billionaire hellbent on railroading a city’s affordable housing projects by any means necessary or a president intent on carrying out a personal vengeance tour that enriches those around him and weaponizes the courts to punish those who oppose him — want an apathetic, disengaged public. They depend on it to continue reaping the rewards of corruption unimpeded.
The truth is democracy isn’t and can’t be a spectator sport, and it cannot give back more than we put into it. This is even more true when our system has been undermined by those who spread misinformation and attempt to make voting more difficult. As such, we owe it to each other to engage at every level of government, to pay attention and work to impact the decisions that affect us and our neighbors. When it comes to government transparency laws, it’s one thing for a newspaper to document a violation, and another entirely for folks who read that coverage to then flood a governing body’s chambers to demand it follow the law. That is the path to change.
But while conditions may be spotty with a chance of showers in Humboldt, the real storm is gathering across the country, where the new presidential administration is waging an opaque, multi-front war on transparency.
In the first weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump’s administration began pulling reams of documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Justice and Census Bureau, Department of Health and Human Services and Environmental Protection Agency’s websites, hiding what those offices considered vital public information. At the same time, Trump’s administration reportedly barred spokespeople from some agencies from speaking publicly. As a result, efforts to confirm the local layoffs of federal employees, right here in Humboldt, have been met with obfuscation and silence.
Also within weeks of taking office, Trump took the unprecedented step of restricting access to White House press pool reports, and blocked an Associated Press reporter from an official Oval Office event because the wire service made the editorial decision continue referring to the Gulf of Mexico by its centuries-old name despite Trump’s order it be called the Gulf of America. He’s also continued to push lawsuits against CBS News and the Des Moines Register, while threatening to pull the broadcast licenses of other outlets.
What chilling effects such legal action will have on other big news outlets, much less smaller local operations, remains to be seen. How can a small town paper expect to defend itself against the full force of the executive branch if coverage of, say, local federal layoffs draws the president’s ire?
And as all this has played out, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his Department of Government Efficiency (whether he is in fact in charge of the department is a matter of conflicting statements and legal debate) continue to work in darkness to enact large-scale federal layoffs and budget cuts, all while sidestepping federal government transparency and disclosure laws aimed at protecting the public’s right to know and prevent conflicts of interest.
The truth is, as Sunshine Week ends, the people’s right to know and the media that is on the front lines of protecting it are under a full-scale attack. How successful those attacks are ultimately depends on how people — each of us at our school board and city council and county supervisors’ meetings — respond.
The time is now to demand all our institutions honor not just the letter, but the principles of transparency enshrined in state and federal law. Failing to do so will result in a world of darkness, where none of us has any idea what’s being done in our names or why. •
This article appears in Youngest North Coast Condor Dies of Lead Poisoning.
