Silliness about newspapers and the lobbying laws
Posted by gilt on March 30, 2007
A real money loser for Florida newspapers is delivering and selling papers in Tallahassee. The metros did this routinely for years as support for their capitol bureaus and as a public service. The rationale was to show local delegations that their papers were paying attention to the legislators’ activities; the editorial pages also had their voices strengthened by same-day presence at capitol breakfast tables.
The harsh, economic challenge facing papers has led to significant cutbacks in Tallahassee service is the past three years. With the exceptions of the St. Petersburg Times and Florida Times-Union, state papers have either eliminated distribution in Tallahassee or limited it to the 60-day legislative session.
So now come Senate and House leaders crimping that distribution even further by prohibiting the delivery of free papers to legislators. Lucy Morgan, the Times senior capitol correspondent, lays the sorry story out in Friday’s paper.
The leaders allowed courtesy (free) deliveries in the 2006 legislative session. Their tortured logic now is that although most papers don’t directly hire lobbyists they do belong to trade organizations (Florida Press Association, FSNE) that do employ lobbyists. The new lobbying laws prohibit lawmakers “from accepting anything of value, even a cup of coffee, from lobbyists and the businesses that hire them,” Morgan writes. (Full disclosure: I am a registered lobbyist for FSNE for safety’s sake alone. I do not routinely lobby but represent editors’ interests concerning open meetings and open records laws.)
The real reason for this crackdown on freebie papers appears to have more to do with bruised, political feelings than good government. The Senate’s general counsel launched his investigation of the Times’ free deliveries the same day the paper wrote an editorial critical of the legislature’s implementation of the new lobbying law.
Particularly troubling about all this is the legislature’s implicit identification of papers as special interests. This parallels the cultural migration of newspapers’ image from one of disinterested community servant to profit-driven sensationalist. Florida papers, which are among the nation’s best and most responsible, deserve better from the legislature.
