Louisiana: Publish Gun Info, Go To Jail, Pay $10K

They, and Gannett papers in particular, love stories like that because they get to use FOIA requests. Then when requests come through, and the stories get published, they love to pat themselves on the back for using FOIA.

 

Lazy journalism. I had an editor back in the '80s who used to roll his eyes at all of the "tough exposes" written about government using FOIA and say that he wished reporters would spend half as much time trying to develop sources and leads for real stories.

 

Curious about this and I'm not interested in mining through a gazillion web pages to maybe get an answer:

I would assume that family court records are, typically, beyond the reach of FOIA requests. If a reporter "came into possession" of family court records, what legal consequences would follow said reporter (and his/her employer) should those records be published?

 

And yet, we still continue to go to the polls like sheep and vote for Republicans and Democrats to win elections when this is the kind of non-sensical and irrelevant crap that they think passes for good government....

 

Public salaries are a popular list. You don't want your salary published, quit.

I think the public, which pays these salaries through taxes, has the right to know what people are making.

 

Constantly insinuating that we should be outraged by the salaries of public workers doesn't quite cut it as newsworthy for me unless someone you can point to some type of corruption or wrongdoing that led to those salaries. It's cheap and divisive to invite scorn upon ordinary, tax-paying, law-abiding people who have done nothing wrong.

 

"Proud of their government job, just not proud enough for anyone to know what their salary is."

 

It's a database. How is that cheap and inviting scorn?

 

The database of which you speak is typically published as a graphic one the front page of the Sunday Journal News, accompanied by a story that picks out the 2 or 3 people who earned the most money and suggests to you that these people are somehow fucking over the taxpayers by collecting the money they're contractually owed.

 

OK, it's cheap if you don't know the context. But, for example, if the brother of a politician is getting 40 hours of OT a week when others aren't getting any in a similar job that's news.

 

There is nothing wrong with having a list of permit holders and that list being public information. But, there is a lot wrong with a new organization publishing the list just to stir shit up and persecute people who haven't done anything wrong or illegal. But, the paper has that legal right. Every day for two years, I collected felony arraignment information and published it. Arraignments, not convictions. All papers do it. We persecute the innocent every day. It's a legal right but is it right to do?

It's a no-win scenario.

 

That would be a good story about political corruption, but one for which it would be unnecessary to publish name and salary information for anyone but the politician and his brother. The folks in the kind of front-page stories that the Journal News runs are our neighbors, friends and colleagues, part of our community. I felt terrible for the people listed in the gun permit story.