Emails, not interviews

The obstacles and troubling behavior highlighted by the Capitol Correspondents Association of California are broader and more pervasive.

Many offices have moved nearly entirely toward written communications, directing a reporter who does reach someone by phone to instead send their questions by email. Some no longer list a media number on their websites at all, including theCalifornia Department of Public Health, which has often been the primary messenger for the Newsom administration’s pandemic response.

This approach favored by the state government restricts contact through official spokespeople; interview requests for policymakers and subject matter experts are frequently rejected, while agency employees are discouraged from speaking to the press without first getting permission.

During the pandemic, Julie Watts of television station CBS Sacramento spent two yearsinvestigating health and safety failuresat a state-funded COVID-19 testing lab. She was never allowed to speak with Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly, who oversaw the state’s coronavirus response, or Department of Public Health officials about her findings, even after Newsom directed her questions to Ghaly.

Watts said she was forced to rely on written statements, which documents and reports often later revealed to be inaccurate or untrue. Without an opportunity to sit down with Ghaly, Watts said she could not fully push back on the state’s carefully constructed messages and get to the bottom of one of her central questions: Was California getting false information about the effectiveness of the lab, or covering up negligence?

“The answers they were sending us in writing were disingenuous,” Watts said, adding that it made her question whether the state had something to hide. “We were talking about complex, scientific issues. And it’s difficult to convey that to the public when it’s hundreds of back-and-forth emails.”

Anna Maria Barry-Jestercovered public health in Californiafor the nonprofit Kaiser Health News for nearly four years before moving last summer to investigative news outlet ProPublica. During that time, she said she was only ever granted one interview by the California Department of Public Health.

“The answer was nearly always ‘no,’” Barry-Jester said, whether she was seeking information about state programs, requesting data or trying to speak with an expert on staff. She said she encountered these limitations on stories about everything fromrising syphilis ratesto thecoronavirus vaccine rollouttowastewater surveillance for COVID-19.

The pandemic illuminated the problems in stark terms, as Barry-Jester worked with public health departments in dozens of other states as well. From those agencies, she was able to get program descriptions, explanations for how they were tracking data, interviews with experts and insight into their biggest challenges confronting the coronavirus with limited resources.

“California’s was particularly obstructionist,” Barry-Jester said. “It was nearly impossible to get answers to basic questions.”

The written responses crafted by communications staff are often sent anonymously from a general email account, as though coming from the entire faceless bureaucracy rather than a particular spokesperson. For example, media inquiries fulfilled by the state Department of Justice, which is overseen by Attorney General Rob Bonta, are generally signed only “Press Office.”

The result is a slower, more complicated process for sharing public information. Follow-up and clarifying questions that would be quickly settled in an interview or phone call can be drawn out over days of correspondence. That’s a luxury of time that is not always available to reporters, especially in a breaking news situation. Sometimes those written responses blow through deadlines, coming after a story has been published or never at all.

Ariane Lange, an enterprise reporter for The Sacramento Bee, said she submitted a public records request to the Department of Health Care Services last summer for which she still has not received any documents.

Though she was initially told she would begin getting records in mid-September, related to the department’s relationship with an independent mediator that helped develop its doula benefit for Medi-Cal recipients, Lange said numerous attempts to get an explanation for the delay have been unsuccessful. Record requests are submitted through an online portal that does not allow for messaging, while her questions to the department’s media office about the situation have routinely been ignored.

After a public information officer told Lange that she didn’t even have a phone number where she could be reached, a frustrated Langecomplained on Twitterlast month that “email culture has gone too far.” She said she wants to get someone on the phone to find out if her request could be narrowed to speed up production.

“It feels like one of those things where we could work it out if we could just talk about it, but no one wants to talk to me at all,” Lange said. “It seems against the spirit of public service.”

Demanding better practices

In the guidelines it shared with reporters last month, the correspondents association recommended that media describe the rejection of an interview request in the story, alongside the written statement that an agency provides instead.

The association urged journalists not to provide questions in advance of an interview, other than a general description of the information they are seeking, writing: “Journalism ethics requires us to maintain our objectivity, and by giving these questions in advance you would be providing the office or agency an opportunity to rehearse for a basic function of their job and take control of the messaging.”

The guidelines also include a glossary of attribution terms and suggest pointing out in a story when government officials or spokespeople refuse to be identified, “especially in cases where a state agency is making an announcement or providing general information to a broad range of reporters.” One example the guidelines cite: Apress briefing in Octoberwhere the Newsom administration would not allow journalists to name the senior officials, including Ghaly, announcing the end date for California’s COVID-19 state of emergency.

Zavala, the association president, said the fragmented approaches of different media outlets have allowed state agencies to simply stick to whatever is easiest for their press teams. She said the reporting guidelines are intended to foster a unity among journalists to demand better practices. Alongside the document, the correspondents association also sent out a survey to collect more data from reporters about their biggest problems covering state government.

“We may be competitors, but it’s important for us to be on the same page,” Zavala said. “Journalists are the voices of communities, of people in this state, of voters, of taxpayers. We are the ones who have the opportunity to ask these questions on their behalf. That’s who we’re representing.”

Speed vs. accuracy

State communications officials said they aim to provide timely and accurate information to the media and the public, but those values are not always aligned.

Complex inquiries from reporters can require consulting multiple subject-matter experts for thorough answers and obtaining many layers of approval, sometimes in conjunction with other agencies.

Officials said they generally ask for questions in advance because it helps them determine who is best equipped to handle the inquiry. Providing interviews with agency staff can require a lot of preparation and coordinating schedules, so they often prefer to send written responses instead.

“We can’t just answer quickly to meet a deadline. It does nobody any favors if we provide information that is incorrect,” said Peter Melton, a public information officer with the Department of Industrial Relations.

The department declined a formal interview last summer for a CalMatters story on howfew California workers are fully repaideven after winning wage theft claims, then nearly two weeks later, canceled an offer for a background conversationabout its judgment enforcement unitto focus on a series of written questions the reporters had sent.

“If someone is asking highly-specialized questions that require someone highly specialized, they might not be available at that time,” Melton said. “If we put someone on the phone, and the questions are outside their scope, then it’s a wasted effort.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to the media after announcing the state’s plan to address homelessness across California at an event at Cal Expo in Sacramento, on March 16, 2023.Miguel Gutierrez Jr. / CalMatters

Because many state employees are still primarily working from home, some large communications offices do everything by email so that their staff can collectively track and respond to the media inquiries they receive throughout the day.

“The quickest way to reach the team is through that inbox,” said Ali Bay, the director of communications for the California Department of Public Health, which removed the phone number for its press office from its contact page but maintains a general email address.

The department declined to make anyone available for a story CalMatters published last fall about howcongenital syphilis rates soared in Californiaover the past decade as public health funding fell. During a year spent working on the project, the reporter asked multiple times to speak to experts from the department’s sexually transmitted diseases control branch, but those requests were ignored and the department only answered questions for the story by email.

Bay said the department has been inundated with media inquiries since the pandemic, including more than 8,100 in 2020 alone. While the number has since dropped, to more than 1,800 last year, that still represents a nearly 70% increase over 2019. During that time, the department’s media team has grown to 10 positions, from seven, though it relied on staff from other agencies and contractors for additional help at the height of the pandemic.

“We do our best to accommodate interview requests, acknowledging that one person may not be equipped to answer all of the questions,” Bay said.

Spokespeople for offices that frequently provide unattributed responses said they prefer that the head of their agency serve as its voice.

“Where appropriate and depending on the context, our office is happy to accommodate requests for specific information to be attributable to an individual in the press office,” Bethany Lesser, the director of communications for the Department of Justice, said in a text message. “Our usual practice is for comments to come from the Attorney General or the department as a whole.”

These policies are generally not unlawful, noted Loy of the First Amendment Coalition, because public officials and state agencies are not legally obligated to speak to the press.

But many of them are nevertheless antithetical to the spirit of open government, he said, preventing journalists from obtaining the public information that they need to hold the government to account.

“Is the government there to serve the people or is the government there to be a spin machine?” Loy said. “It may seem inconvenient to the government, but at the end of the day, a government that is most accountable to the people is the best government.”