Editorial by Troy Torres, Kandit News & Views
We watched with dismay a public hearing, where executives of the news media told senators the government should define and regulate the news. In the background the Constitution could be heard being ripped apart by the very people entrusted by the Founding Fathers to place a fourth branch check on what can be the overwhelming tyranny of government.
Back in 1997, the Guam Legislature had the wisdom to require government bodies to publish notices of meetings; one notice at least five days prior to a meeting, and a second notice two days before the meeting would begin. Laws since then have updated that statute inside the Open Government Law. These new regulations require things like the publication of agendas, and require some level of specificity in it. These laws were instituted with one goal in mind: To ensure the public is adequately notified of the actions the government intends to take, and to allow participation in the formulation of public policy.
The internet was not as readily accessible to Guamanians in 1997. It would be years before the legislature would mandate that every government agency promulgate and maintain a website with specific information to be published on each respective site.
Aside from the benefit of public notice of proposed agency action, this notices requirement has resulted in millions of your tax dollars being spent to publish notices in newspapers of general circulation. For most of the past 28 years, those notices were published in two newspapers; however, today only one of them is printed.
Tina Muna Barnes has proposed legislation to update the Open Government Law to respond to the present times. After all, all but one news organization on island predominantly gets information to its various audiences through the internet; mainly through social media like Facebook and Instagram. The internet is the medium through which the vast majority of the public receives its news, editorials, and published opinion pieces.
Her Bill No. 25-38, if enacted, will authorize government agencies to post their meeting notices in locally-licensed electronic newspapers and websites. “Licensed,” simply means that the business license for the news business reflects that it is a news operation. Simple enough. The bill provides other qualification, such as the requirement that the news organization publishes news content and issues editorials.
While Kandit did not request Ms. Muna Barnes to introduce this legislation, and while we had nothing to do with its drafting, amendment, or introduction, it would open the door for us to compete with the other news organizations to publish these public notices in exchange for a fee.
The Ridiculous Amount of Money the Taxpayers Pay Newspapers for Public Notices
I ask you to think about the amount of money you have paid so that the government could publish things in newspapers. According to their own testimony at the public hearing for Bill No. 25-38, the island’s two “newspapers” charge customers thousands of dollars for full page ads. One newspaper editor testified that her agency charges $1,200 for a digital full-page ad for a one-day run that costs nothing in the way of paper, ink, and physical distribution. Smaller ads cost in the hundreds.
Let’s pretend a standard government notice will cost $200. If the combined number of all government notices across all three branches is 1,000, that means that newspaper will be paid $200,000 of your money. Each year.
If Ms. Muna Barnes’ bill were to pass into law and if Kandit ever decided to participate in the procurement, we’d likely give a $7 per ad quote. If there were 1,000 combined notices in any given year, the government would be paying us $7,000.
Think about those savings.
One news organization obviously is opposed to changing the status quo, while another is advocating for greater regulation, i.e. advocating for the legislature to disqualify everyone else from the procurement of advertising. The net effect would be to limit competition and, as a result, to keep as much profit as possible.
How is any of that in the public interest?
Expensive Obituaries Racket
While we’re on the subject of value-lopsided advertising, let’s talk about the arm and the leg newspapers charge for both print and digital obituaries. The charges for print are somewhat justifiable as there is a tangible cost to printing a newspaper and distributing it. But what justifies a news organization charging anything more than $20 for the inclusion of obituaries in a digital version? Kandit publishes obituaries for free.
Charging families during their darkest hours fees that wipe their checking accounts down to $1.63 is morally reprehensible. All these families want to do is memorialize and honor their dead loved one, ask the community to pray for them, and inform the public when and where the funeral will be. How, on this island that touts its core values of chenchule yan respetu, did we allow the news media to profit unabashedly over the solemn death rite?
The news media has extended class warfare from the living to the dead by basing who gets the biggest and most colorful obituary on who can afford it. Those with little means have to settle with a few lines without a picture. Shame on you, news media. Shame on you.
If Public Officials Have Bad Things To Say About A News Room, It Means That News Room Is Doing Its Job the Right Way
Among the funnier statements made during the public hearing on Bill No. 25-38 came from three senators, one of whom Kandit often criticizes. While their whining is not worth our time and effort, let me say this.
Years ago, when I was Eddie Calvo’s communications director and the Pacific Daily News was the standard of journalism in the Western Pacific, I once complained to then-managing editor David Crisostomo about the coverage we were getting from one of his reporters at the time. He said to me, “If you don’t like the way we are covering something, then I can rest easier knowing we’re doing our jobs.”
The journalist’s responsibility is not to appease any public official. To the contrary, our jobs are to dig and to expose and, as a result, to better our community. If Telo Taitague does not like us because we rightly question her after evidence shows she stole a purse from a public agency or she assaulted a process server inside the Guam Congress Building, then so be it.
If all you’re doing is using the Office of Senator to glorify yourself and propel your gubernatorial ambition, people should be unafraid and unencumbered to say that about you. And there should be nothing you can do about that fact; thank you First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Define the News? Stupid, Treacherous, Dangerous, and UnConstitutional
So when these same senators prodded news executives and those news executives agreed that the government should regulate who is news media and what news media should be, we could not believe what we were witnessing.
Why don’t you just give senators your Apple ID passwords and hand over your phones and computers so they can run the newsrooms for you?
The arbiter of which reporter and newsroom is telling the truth – aside from the Almighty – is the reader and the advertiser. And according to the numbers, Kandit has a pretty good reputation among readers spanning from the Marianas to Japan to the U.S. mainland.
We don’t need the government to tell us what we are or whether we are doing our jobs. In fact, that would be anathema to our very existence. The fact that executives of news agencies would in any way advocate for government definition of news media is terrifying, especially in the current global and national climate.
These agencies made the news media and the First Amendment victims in a public hearing that was supposed to expand and propel government obedience to open government. Instead, these agency executives lowered themselves under a pedestal to be subservient to public officials; the exact opposite of our charge.
Senators, don’t you even think of doing something so stupid, unConstitutional, and unAmerican, even if some news executives have betrayed the First Amendment before your eyes.
Conflict of Interest and the Scream of Special Interest
The survival of news media, just like any other business in the market, should be driven by the laws of supply and demand, not on government welfare to news corporations. Kandit thrives on private sector advertising, and we don’t even have a marketing or sales arm. If the readers and the viewers want a news organization to survive, they render their website hit, Facebook reaction, Instagram share, or story comment. Collectively, these supports queue advertisers to which news organization attracts certain demographics who would purchase the advertiser’s products and services.
Not a single one of our advertisers has ever requested the inclusion or the take down of news or editorial content. None of them have ever even commented positively or negatively to any of our content. That is not and should never be the nature of news-supported advertising. Aside from being highly unethical, it would destroy the credibility of a news organization’s objectivity (not to be mistaken for bias; the truth is innately biased to the truth).
If “the truth” is for sale, democracy would crumble. But that is precisely what government advertising in news media condones: the preferential and subjective treatment of public officials by the people entrusted to watch over and objectively report the actions of the government to the masses. This is not to say that those news organizations that accept government advertising are doing something necessarily bad. It is possible to accept the advertising as a trade of publishing information and media in exchange for cash. But, if news rooms and executives are shaking down the legislature to enact policies that will result in news companies siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from taxpayers in advertising revenue… talk about a conflict of interest. That is the epitome of special interest being promoted by the one segment of society that is supposed to be exposing and fighting against special interest in government.
Here’s the Real Solution
Some of our brothers and sisters in the media have been apprehensive about Kandit since our start, and that’s okay. We have never considered any of them to be competitors, and it is our hope that one day they don’t view us or the others as competitors either. The more the merrier is our view. But for the newspaper executives to say that news groups like the Marianas Business Journal, the Pacific Island Times, and the various radio shows are unequipped to provide public notices and be treated as full news organizations is nothing but self-interested BS. Don’t tell me that the Patti Arroyo Show, which thousands of people listen to every morning, is not a source of all-around news information and editorial and op-ed commentary. In fact, that’s the place where I find out about government meetings every weekday morning. Thank you Dicey Dice and Patti Arroyo for that unpaid public service.
If Ms. Muna Barnes’ bill passes into law, good. It will be an improvement, an update. Kandit and others likely will participate and bid on publishing public notices. We would likely bid, as I mentioned above, just $7 per ad.
But there’s another solution to be had here, and it is one that not only makes more sense, but would be an actual update to our times.
The government doesn’t need the news media at all to publish notices. It can do it on its own. Since the dawn of the government website law, the government of Guam has had the tools to notify the public of meetings and events.
Earlier today, I got a note from Kandit reader Jordan Bukikosa, who summed up a great idea that we believe Ms. Muna Barnes or the committee entertaining her Bill No. 25-38 should use to markup the bill into something much better.
With his permission, here is Mr. Bukikosa’s great idea:
“If there’s one thing I have to say, it’s that I believe there is a need for a centralized government announcement board beyond what the Legislature has tried to set up.
“The problem is that there is just way too much going on between meetings, procurements, and other general announcements. This should be centralized, and folded into the current law, requiring that the information be on a dashboard or all actions be null and voidable.
“The Legislature needs to determine an official home in the government for this Program with full time staffing mandated to maintaining an information dashboard that is updated consistently, and require all government entities to submit all public notices for all means.
“It needs to be filterable, contain standardized details from the general content to the dates and deadlines to the agency contact information. It needs to maintain archived records of all notices as well.
“While I appreciate the Post’s and PDN’s concern on this, I find it unnerving that the Legislature is contemplating picking winners and losers here. Nothing stops news media from publishing information from Government resources without compensation. There is no need to mandate that we must pay for their advertising services so that they can “do their jobs” and inform the public about a government action.
“Not only would providing a proper board eliminate this need, it would also eliminate the concern brought up by PDN and Post themselves in that even right now, the noticing requirement makes it hard to know where the announcement is being made. We need to remedy this problem, and I don’t believe that any solution based on the current requirements of the law would sufficiently address this issue.”
The government of Guam already has all the access and the tools needed to adequately inform the public of meetings and events on its own. It doesn’t need to use tax money to pay any news organization anything to get this done. Why use a third party, when you can do it yourself?
We no longer live in a time, when the only way you got daily news was from the morning printed paper, the radio talk shows, and the six o clock prime time news. The original notice requirements of the Open Government Law were designed for that long-gone era. Instead of simply updating these requirements to continue serving the needs of the news media, why don’t senators revamp it all to truly serve the public?
At the end of the day, the question every news room needs to ask is whom do we serve? The truth, or our profit? Because, as the Good Book says, we can’t serve two masters. And one of them sure as hell should not be the government.
