Of Donkeys and Emails
May 4th, 2007 by JamieB
“I’ve been knocked off the donkey. I’ve seen the light.”
House Majority Leader H. William DeWeese (D-Waynesburg)’s self-referential analogy to the experience of Saul on the road to Damascus is no small matter. As DeWeese himself has acknowledged, he has not historically been a resolute supporter of open-records reform. So to have a long-time House leader and former speaker join the train is a significant addition. More importantly, it signals that the issue does have strong public support.
Many people, whose number undoubtedly includes a disproportionate share of state legislators, believed that, at the end of the day, changing the Right-to-Know law was not a high priority for most voters. I should know. I was one of them. But the response to this site, and the growing support among lawmakers, is quickly proving otherwise. This is an issue with traction.
It is also an issue that cuts, not just across political parties, but across political philosophies. Oh, there is probably a monarchist or two who thinks the government should be entitled to operate out of public view, but others – from small-government conservatives to “good-government” liberal reformers – recognize that transparency is the foundation of representative democracy.
The divide over open records is not between Republicans and Democrats. It is not between liberals and conservatives. It is not between urban dwellers and rural residents. It is not between easterners and westerners.
It is between insiders and outsiders – that is to say, insiders and the rest of us.
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Should emails be considered public records?
This is a matter that has been much in the national news of late because of all the buzz surrounding the case of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the six U.S. attorneys who lost their jobs.
Under current Pennsylvania state law, few if any emails would constitute public records. And most people rightly consider private correspondence to be private. But for a variety of reasons, many legislators and other officials use their private email and BlackBerry accounts to do public business.
As in a lot of areas we will examine in the future, drawing a line here is not easy . . . and it will never be perfectly clear.
What do you think?
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A lot of people are picking up on our blog, including Editor &Publisher, which highlights it in its new issue: Pennsylvania Newspaper Association Pushing for More Open Records.