Stephen Ulibarri, the Santa Fe County spokesman, recently sent out a memo to staff that is, to say the least, troubling and that one could argue constitutes more than a friendly warning. 

 

Ulibarri writes to county staff:

 

…warning them that economic hard times in the media industry will cause reporters to start digging for dirt.

"I receive calls on a daily basis looking for information on stories that focus on investigations seeking to find evidence of mismanagement and scandal," Ulibarri wrote in the memo, which was sent to county staff July 9.

 

He goes on to say certain reporters are bullying county staff. When asked to cite examples by a Santa Fe New Mexican reporter, he declined.

Ulibarri’s memo ends with this paragraph:
 

These warnings top a final paragraph that reiterates the county’s policy that staff members are free to speak to the press. "However, it will be that individual speaking and not SF County’s official position," he wrote. "No staff member is under any obligation to talk to the media regardless of what they may tell you." 

I’m sorry. But after nearly 20 years as a reporter that memo has all the tell-tale signs of a hard-edge warning to staff despite the disclaimer tacked on at the end.

 

The memo could almost be viewed as laughable as the Jedi mind trick memo a few reporters wrote about in 2005 except that this is serious business.

First, I find it a little overwrought for him to say that all reporters are looking for dirt. This comes from how many years of experience in dealing with the media? 

Secondly, I’m not sure if Mr. Ulibarri has ever worked in the media and whether he realizes that the cutbacks he refers to actually mean there’s less investigative-type journalism being done these days. That’s because there are fewer people in newsrooms who have the time necessary and the ability to unearth serious wrongdoing. In this era of skeletal newsrooms, most media outlets can’t spare bodies to go off for weeks to investigate serious wrongdoing.

Thirdly, and more importantly, the media is called to root out important stories and we often turn to insiders who become ‘whistleblowers’ in the parlance of government.

We turn to these people many times because official sources block efforts to get at the real story that goes untold more often than I’d like to admit. Power does not like being challenged. The threat of retribution can be very real for those who risk coming forward. Think Jeffrey Weigand and Big Tobacco. Or Watergate and Mark Felt, Sr., aka, Deep Throat, who didn’t reveal his role in bringing down President Richard Nixon for more than 30 years.

It is the role of the media to act as a watchdog over government, a job it has failed to perform on so many occasions. To offer a counterpoint to Mr. Ulibarri’s message that reporters are looking for dirt, uncovering a scandal isn’t always about titillation — to get the tongues wagging — but about serious things like misspent taxpayer money, broken laws, etc. Sometimes, just sometimes, the media can perform a necessary role in a democracy by uncovering scandals and that is to shine a light on how things really work, not what you read in books. The media doesn’t always live up to that lofty aspiration but that is part of its calling.

I don’t know Mr. Ulibarri, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. What I do know is that part of his job is to keep stories that may reflect poorly on the county commission and/or the county administration off the front pages, whether in paper or Internet form, and off the evening broadcasts. And if those stories do appear, his job is to soften the blow. That’s his job.

Finally, as with any industry, I acknowledge that there are conscientious reporters and lazy reporters. If Mr. Ulibarri is targeting the latter, great. But don’t lump all the media into one big pile. That’s sort of like saying all elected officials are in it for themselves. Any thinking person who has spent time with elected officials would realize that a statement like that is a straw man very easily knocked down.