Florida’s governing class has, for decades, valued their spin doctors far more than police, prison guards, child protective investigators and others who risk their lives daily in public service.
Recessions come and go, but the standing army of people whose job it is to talk transparency while obstructing journalism is untouchable.
Florida TaxWatch crunched the numbers last year. As of April 2011, Florida’s professional palace guard included 126 “communications” people pulling down a median salary of $57,559. That compares with an average salary of $38,540 for folks whose workday does not include talkin’ Twitter on SayfieReview.
Benefits include the hope of upgrading from a $71,000 mouthpiece gig in the governor’s office to flacking on the national stage, like 25-year-old Amy Graham, who just left Gov. Rick Scott’s office to “communicate” for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Think Symbionese Liberation Army with reporters in the role of kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst. The flack’s job is to lock journalists in closets with little informational nourishment and lots of abuse, interspersed with flattery and Facebook footsie. While they don’t expect to turn reporters into bank robbers, they’re putting a 21st-century twist on the Florida Supreme Court’s 20th-century observation that “News delayed is news denied.”
If “communications” people can stand between the press and public officials who actually know things, there’s an excellent chance the reporter will be laid off or off to law school before s/he has a chance to write a story that’s “not positive.”
Outnumbered, reporters do the best they can for their readers by whatever means necessary. In a recent column, Tallahassee Democrat politics editor Paul Flemming describes “… wheedling entreaties to [flacks’] sense of fairness” and “catty asides about other reporters” to cajole a breadcrumb of information from the captors of public information.
It’s a tribute to what’s left of the press that the truth gets out as often as it does. When it comes to playing keep-away from reporters, Florida’s flacks got the moves like Jagger. And Kafka.
For a closer look at the Sunshine Shuffle, go to Gov. Rick Scott’s new website, www.sunburst.flgov.com, and follow the odyssey of New York Times national correspondent Serge Kovaleski as he tries to get past happy-talk press releases and figure out what really happened in the Capitol as it dawned on officials that the Trayvon Martin story was not going away.
After days of being jerked around and with deadline approaching, Kovaleski, a Pulitzer Prize-winner not accustomed to being trapped in the closet, emailed the governor’s first-string flack Brian Burgess:
“…..I am in the writing stage of the story, and I still have received no answers from you or your staff regarding my questions about [former and current top prosecutors in the Martin case] Mr. Wolfinger and Ms. Corey despite going back and forth with your office for days.
“Your statement that your staff worked very hard to help me is bizarre and demonstrably false given that they sent me nothing more than an old press release and put me on the phone with the Lt. Gov., who said outright that she did not have any information to answer questions concerning either state attorney and the Martin/Zimmerman case …”
Short-timer Graham comforted Burgess in a May 2 instant-classic email. “This guy is exactly why I don’t read the New York Times.”
Past Florida governors like Farris Bryant, Reubin Askew, Bob Graham and Jeb Bush weren’t afraid to read newspapers they didn’t like. They had the stones and the smarts to speak for themselves. They knew that if you want good press, all you gotta do is good work.
Florence Snyder is a Tallahassee-based corporate lawyer who has spent most of her career in and around newspapers. ©floridavoices
This article appears in May 17-23, 2012.
