When the press is left in the dark, so are the people

AUSTIN — When Ben Barnes became speaker of the Texas House early in his political career, one of his challenges was to make accommodations for accredited members of the Capitol press corps to cover the Legislature. It was not a small task.

Guest opinion by JOHN C. MORITZ, Corpus Christi Caller-Times, USA Today Network - Texas

“I remember there were 77 members of the Capitol press that had to have offices,” Barnes recalled of his early speakership in 1965. “Seventy-seven different people, and I provided that.”

Back then, most of Texas’ major cities had two competitive newspapers with well-staffed Capitol bureaus. The Associated Press and United Press International wire services filled in the gaps when the papers’ reporters were stretched too thin, and for the smaller markets without a presence in Austin of their own.

And the reporting process was noisier and messier. Pocket-sized recorders were decades away from invention, so notes were scribbled into notebooks describing the action on the chamber floors and inside the cramped committee hearing rooms. The notes were transformed into news copy by the clanking of keys on paper-devouring typewriters. Telephones were lashed to a tangled mesh of wires that snaked from outlets in the Capitol’s walls. Indoor smoking was accepted as the norm.

Having 77 accredited members of the press corps meant that the House member-to-reporter ratio was about 2- to-1 in the 150-member chamber. And reporters outnumbered the 31 state senators by more than 2-to-1. It never occurred to Barnes, a few years shy of his 30th birthday and something of a political wunderkind at the time, to shove the press aside and shut reporters out of the process.

Now, a full 58 years later, that cadre of reporters and photographers has shrunk substantially. And so, it seems, has the sense that a vibrant press is an essential component of the often messy and chaotic experiment called self-government. Today, there are fewer reporters working for fewer news outlets in Austin, but the mission is just as vital. In 2021 when COVID-19 restrictions limited the opportunities for close personal contact, the House reserved fewer spaces on the chamber floor for reporters. The Senate kept reporters off its chamber floor completely. This go round as the pandemic has receded, the House lifted its press restrictions. The Senate did not, even though the table to the right of the chamber’s dais that for decades had been reserved for press sits unused.

Reporters, who in the past could catch the eye of a senator or staff member for a quick chat or explanation of a bill in the hallway outside the chamber, are now relegated to the gallery above the floor where sight lines are limited and interaction is impossible. And there’s no place to set up a laptop for note-taking or story-filing in real time.

Another deviation of the norm happened on Feb. 16 when Gov. Greg Abbott gave his State of the State address where he laid out the priorities he wants lawmakers to work on. Instead of taking place in the House chamber before a joint session of the Legislature, it happened in something of a private session sponsored by the chamber of commerce in San Marcos.

One television news outlet provided a livestream and air on its affiliated channels, but no reporters were permitted access to the venue. In fact, the news release issued by the governor’s office did not even say where the venue was.

All of this might sound like a reporter whining about a lost privilege or pining for the good old days when access was less restricted. But the intention goes far beyond that. Unless they are government employees or political activists, most people can likely count on the fingers of one hand the number of government meetings they’ve attended or the number of elected officials they’ve spoken with in any given year.

Capitol reporters, by contrast, will often use up the fingers of both hands counting the number of committee hearings, news conferences and close encounters with policymakers they burn through on any given day when the Legislature is in session. A lot of it is dreadfully boring and a lot of it is kind of fun and exhilarating, to be honest.

But the net result is that we can provide a concise account of what your state government is up to. That includes how it spends your money, how it seeks to educate your kids, where it plans to improve highways and what personal health decisions are actually personal.

When reporters’ access is choked off, that means there are fewer opportunities to tell Texans what they need to know and more opportunities for those in power to decide what they want Texans to know.

And when it’s left to the politicians to decide the terms of how the public is informed, that whole experiment in self-government thing can unravel in a hurry.

John C. Moritz covers Texas government and politics for the USA Today Network in Austin. Contact him at John.Moritz@caller.com and follow him on Twitter @JohnnieMo.