Mayor Adrian Fenty, like his predecessor Anthony Williams, talks often about having an “open and transparent” administration. But this early in his administration, Fenty also resembles Williams in having, instead, a closed and opaque administration, in delaying, withholding and denying the release of information that should be public.
Since the early 1980s, as both a community activist and a journalist, I have interacted with three previous Washington mayors and their staffs.
As executive director of DCWatch, a good-government organization that publishes the online magazine DCWatch.com, I have attended news conferences and asked officials for information that legally must be made public, and I have not hesitated to ask repeatedly when they don’t provide that information or when they do not answer questions or answer them misleadingly. Many times these officials resented my questions and evaded them — Williams once said he often wanted to jump over the podium in the news briefing room and strangle me.
Yet on Jan. 10, for the first time, a government official had his attorney write me a threatening letter. Peter Nickles, the general counsel to Mayor Fenty, wrote claiming that “at press conferences and otherwise” that they “treat questions from the public and, of course, from the press with respect and candor,” and accusing me of not reciprocating “this sense of respect in [my] dealings with members of our Administration.”
I take the receipt of a lawyer’s letter seriously, and I recognize it as a not-so-subtle demand that I treat the mayor and his staff with more deference and back down from asking hard questions at news conferences or requesting information they don’t want to provide.
Currently, I have several requests for information pending, some of them unanswered for weeks. Among them are inquiries about the names, positions and salaries of the Fenty transition staff; an accounting of the costs and funders of the Nov. 6, 2006, birthday party for Fenty at St. Coletta’s School; the budget for and contributions received for all inaugural activities; the salaries and remuneration contracts negotiated with Fenty Cabinet appointees and mayoral staff; and information regarding who commissioned and paid for the Parthenon Group report that Fenty is using to promote his school takeover plan.
I am not alone. Several members of the media corps can already cite examples of the Fenty administration’s refusing information, promising information and never delivering it, or treating them rudely and dismissively.
The press’ job is to ask questions that the public needs answered, even if those questions are difficult or embarrassing for Fenty and his staff or if they are not prepared to answer them. Our job is to keep asking for that information repeatedly, until it is provided. We’re not doing our job if we simply take the news release and reprint them, ask only softball and flattering questions, and refrain from asking for additional information.
I would normally treat the administration’s effort at intimidation as a private matter. However, Mr. Nickles released his letter to the press even before I had received it in the mail, so I assume that he wanted to pick a public fight. So be it. It isn’t going to change me; it isn’t going to change the public’s right to know even information that the administration wants to keep secret; and it isn’t going to change their duty to provide that information.
Dorothy Brizill is the executive director of DCWatch.
