InkBlots

Basic computer technology - the kind found in almost every office or classroom in America - is giving people easy access to candidates’ campaign finance information in many states. But not in Mississippi.

A nationwide, yearly study that grades states on how they inform voters about where politicians get their campaign donations gives Mississippi a fat “F” and ranks it 47th out of 50. What’s more, while many other states have improved in recent years, Mississippi had a backslide, dropping from a D to an F.

Republican Mike Chaney said he spent around $1 million to win the Mississippi insurance commissioner’s race in 2007. But it’s not always easy to find out where candidates get their campaign money. Even they have difficulty tracking the funds.

MORE:

• The Sun Herald: The only thing in politics that ought to be kept a secret is how you voted.
• Candidates who run for county offices in Mississippi are required to file campaign finance reports, but it is unclear who enforces fines for late filers.
• Brookhaven Daily Leader: Locally, citizens can take comfort that - for the most part - current administrators of the city, county and schools, and law enforcement officials make good faith efforts to conduct themselves accordingly regarding public records and open meetings. One school board even has, if you will, a “cheat sheet” to make sure they are following the law when opting to close a meeting and go into executive session, most often for student-related matters. Unfortunately, efforts to follow to the law have not always the norm here.
  
• The Clarion-Ledger: Voters today are bombarded with messages by candidates seeking office. Millions of dollars are spent by Mississippi candidates in campaigns and the price of politics continues to rise. But the critical information voters need is often missing - just where is all of that money coming from and how is it being spent?
• The Natchez Democrat: Common criminals in Mississippi get more help accessing information and defending their legal rights than does the rare citizen who dares to seek public information.
• RELATED: In announcing that he was going to push for campaign finance reforms, Attorney General Jim Hood on Monday suggested that he was the target of “rumor and innuendo” regarding his acceptance of prior campaign contributions from attorneys implicated in the state’s ongoing judicial bribery scandal. Yet at the same time he’s talking a good game about openness in government and transparent campaign finance laws, Hood’s latest foray into the courtroom on behalf of Mississippi taxpayers resulted in a sealed settlement with State Farm Insurance.
• AUDIO ON-DEMAND: Biloxi Sun Herald editor Stan Tiner and attorney Leonard Van Slyke discuss the Secrecy series on MPB Radio’s “Mississippi Edition.”

The Neshoba Democrat’s sponsored copies will no longer be welcome at a Philly nuring home, so sez a hospital rep.

If someone steals your car in Mississippi, you call the police. If someone defrauds you, you call the attorney general. But if someone denies you access to public records, no taxpayer-funded agency will help you. Instead, you hire an attorney.

In Mississippi, a state with a long history of government secrecy, it can be difficult, expensive, time-consuming - and sometimes all but impossible - to know what government leaders are up to and what special interests pull their strings.

More:

• Charlie Mitchell: “Put 10 Mississippi government officials or commission appointees in a room and it would be interesting to hear their answers to a quiz on what constitutes a ‘personnel matter,’ probably the most often invoked exception to the state’s open meetings act.”
• Mississippi’s open records and public meeting laws contain exceptions, broad confusing language and little means of enforcement that throw up roadblocks to citizens seeking to use the laws to gain access to their government…Exemptions for such items as “personnel” matters are often broadly interpreted by officials, or interpreted in various conflicting ways to deny access to information.
• Greenwood Commonwealth: Secret government is bad government.
• Kevin Cooper: “Catching a public servant doing wrong is a little like discovering your preacher is a drunken gambler, who kicks dogs and pinches babies for fun on the weekends.”
• David Hampton’s blog: “The best remedy for secrecy is citizen involvement. That is what passed the original laws and that is what it will take to toughen them.”
• Andy Taggart’s blog: “Here’s hoping that the…first initiative in [the] new push is to obtain a copy of the ’sealed’ settlement agreement between Attorney General Jim Hood and State Farm Insurance Company.
• Related: Tougher ethics rules up for debate.
• Related: Attorney General Jim Hood pushing for campaign finance reform this session.

Emmerich dailies Clarksdale Press Register, Greenville Delta Democrat Times and Greenwood Commonwealth all announced recently their papers will discontinue TV listings. Some readers are not amused with the move, which was bound to happen in the era of instantaneous Internet listings and the advent of Tivo and DVRs.

The tab sections for many papers are often considered little more than a weekly expense (it’s been years since we’ve seen a viable one with strong ad support). Still, with home Internet penetration in Mississippi not cracking 60 percent, one wonders if the customer goodwill generated from them was worth more than the cost of ink and newsprint.

Open access to public meetings and public records is essential to government accountability, yet Mississippi’s laws are full of exemptions that perpetuate a culture of secrecy.

Legislation is being filed this year to try to tighten some of the exemptions and to give people a better chance to see the workings of their local and state governments - the governments that taxpayers support with their hard-earned dollars.

News organizations across Mississippi have produced an eight-day series of reports about secrecy in government. These articles represent an extraordinary effort by reporters and editors who are concerned that the lack of transparency in Mississippi is harmful to the state’s well-being.

The legislative declaration at the beginning of Mississippi’s Open Meetings Act is a practical statement for the need for open government.

It is “essential” to the operation of our government that citizens be aware of the actions of public officials in determining the policies that affect their lives. While this idea is generally accepted, it is not always practiced.

The newspapers, the Mississippi Center for Freedom of Information, the AP and the Mississippi Press Association hope to get the attention of the public and the Legislature and get some much-needed sunshine law reforms.

MORE:

• Public boards shouldn’t go into closed meetings just because they can.
• The Clarion-Ledger’s two-year investigation into the state Department of Health faced an uphill climb as the administration, led by then-State Health Officer Brian Amy, required open-records requests for every piece of information the newspaper sought.
• Ronnie Agnew: “Millions of dollars in taxpayer money are wasted each year in Mississippi and the public doesn’t even know it.”
• David Hampton: “Until 1975, there were no laws in Mississippi requiring that government meetings be open to the public.”
• Three Adams County Supervisors shut out the public last week as they met illegally; circumventing state laws intended to protect the very citizens who pay the supervisors’ salaries.
• The Sun Herald: “Don’t wait until a government door is slammed in your face or you are tossed out of a public meeting or you are denied a public document of vital importance to you to become concerned about these issues. The time to concern yourself is now.”

The print and online editions of the Bolivar Commercial both received face lifts last week. We haven’t seen the print copy yet, but the Website, hosted by Walls New Media, is clean and a definite improvement.

Coverage from last night’s severe weather, which has been blamed for as many as 48 deaths, mostly in Tennessee…

• The Daily Mississippian has a roundup of storms affecting north central Mississippi, including funnel clouds in Lafayette County.
• The Commercial Appeal details severe damage in Memphis, including a collapsed wall at a south city mall and a devastated office building where three people were killed.
• Online Extra coverage from the Daily Journal.
• Clarion-Ledger photo gallery.
• Photos of Lafayette County damage and the funnel cloud in the Calhoun County Journal.

A second newspaper in Philadelphia? So it was reported in the Neshoba Democrat last week.

If you haven’t heard about Rep. Ted Mayhall’s bill that would prevent restaurants from serving obese patrons, you can read about it in the national press here and here (scores of more outlets, as well as Leno, Letterman and Stewart will likely dutifully follow suit).

We’re not sure what Rep. Mayhall expects in terms of support for this bill, but we’re pretty dern sure the Mississippi Hotel and Restaurant Association won’t be enthusiastic.

Sid Salter, Perspective Editor for The Clarion-Ledger and a longtime state political columnist, reminisces about a laughable attempt a dozen years ago by former state Rep. Tommy Horne of Meridian to force newspaper editorial writers to sign their name to their work. Your dutiful editor at the time was working in a small weekly newsroom and was, in fact, signing his editorials, as some opinion writers did when it was an individual newspaper’s custom.

We found it deliciously ironic, nevertheless, that Horne would call for such at a time when he also supported secret deliberations for conference committees. His term and squirrely ideas on editorials faded away, but Salter now astutely points out that many opinions exchanged between newspaper readers on their Websites are pointed and, more often than not, quite anonymous.