Gavin Newsom Has failed California, A Failure To Communicate: California Government Cuts Back Press Access

California Republicans list the top failures of Governor Newsom as his second term begins:With the inauguration of Governor Gavin Newsom’s second term to take place this morning, the California Senate Republican Caucus shares a list of the governor’s top 10 failures that have impacted families under his dismal leadership. 1.Homelessness — 2.Drought —. 3.High gas prices —.4. Early release of convicted felons- 5.Education- 6.Businesses fleeing California —7.EDD — .8 French laundry scandal/NFL Luxury Suite scandal — 9.Wildfire prevention efforts —.10.High-speed rail. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsom’s threat to Walgreens fizzles, On March 6, Gov. Gavin Newsom sent the policy world into a frenzy when, without any notice, he tweeted that “California won’t be doing business with Walgreens,” because of the company’s decision to not distribute an abortion pill in states that banned the medication. But it turns out that Walgreens won’t lose that much state business after all. But it turns out that Walgreens won’t lose that much state business after all. As CalMatters’ Kristen Hwang and Ana Ibarra reported, California had a $54 million contract with Walgreens. There were 600 Walgreens stores in California, making up 10% of the state’s pharmacy market. And it was such a vital prescription provider for Medi-Cal insurers that store locations were listed on the state’s pharmacy directory for enrollees. In short, California cutting ties with Walgreens would have been a big deal. Indeed, Newsom’s tweet (10.4 million views and counting) stoked both outrage and praise, and generated headlines and op-eds from national news outlets. But as California Healthline reported Thursday, it appears that the governor’s proposal isn’t going to have as dramatic an impact on Walgreens as initially thought. Walgreens is allowed to rebid on the contract Newsom said the state wouldn’t renew, and California paid Walgreens a total of $1.5 billion last year. It is also “legally bound to continue doing business with Walgreens through the state’s massive Medicaid program. https://www.lassennews.com/california-republicans-list-the-top-10-failures-of-governor-newsom-as-his-second-term-begins/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- California Government Cuts Back Press Access Accelerated by the COVID pandemic, a shift by state officials toward emails and written statements is making it more difficult for journalists to be watchdogs for Californians. Like so much else about California, its state government is large: A $300 billion budget. More than 230 departments and agencies. More than 234,000 employees. Keeping the public apprised of everything that’s happening in that massive bureaucracy requires its own small army of communications staff, who craft messages, write press releases and answer questions from journalists covering everything from the governor to welfare programs, prisons to water policy.Lately, however, the information isn’t flowing as freely — raising transparency concerns among the press corps that acts as a watchdog for Californians.Last month, the Capitol Correspondents Association of California, which represents journalists who cover the state Capitol and advocates for improved press access, distributed guidelines to its members about how to handle some of the increasingly common hurdles they encounter, including government agencies asking for questions in advance and refusing to attribute information to their spokespeople. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ashley Zavala, president of the correspondents association who covers state government and politics for Sacramento television station KCRA, said the extraordinary step was prompted by years of complaints from Capitol press about problems reporting on Gov. Gavin Newsom, his administration and the Legislature. These have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, which accelerated a shift to digital communication that has transformed how the state government discloses its work. “The pandemic did cause some bad behavior,” Zavala said. “It let some of these agencies and some of these offices get lackadaisical in how they handled the media.”Many of the standard features of government beat reporting — including in-person press conferences, with an opportunity for follow-up questions, and media phone lines where journalists could talk to a live staffer — disappeared three years ago with the shutdown orders and have been slow to return, if at all. Changes that reporters and public information officers adopted to do their jobs virtually in a strange new stay-at-home world became ingrained, encouraging practices, such as written statements instead of interviews, that offer less clarity and greater distance between state government and the people it serves. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This tension — between journalists seeking accountability and a bureaucracy that does not always welcome scrutiny — is not new. Covering state government has grown more difficult in recent years with fewer reporters covering the Capitol and social media offering politicians new ways to reach constituents and voters without speaking to the press. Those trends were exacerbated by restrictions applied during the pandemic.The risk is a decline of “open, honest and transparent communication” essential to the functioning of democracy, said David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for a free press and government disclosure. Media outlets across the state note rejected interview requests, challenges obtaining public records or the lack of any official response in their stories: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For a Los Angeles Times series over the past year about the broken promises of recreational cannabis legalization, the Department of Cannabis Control refused to provide information about complaints filed by exploited workers, ignored questions about policies for handling allegations of labor trafficking, and sought to block the release of satellite imagery mapping illegal cultivations, and the Department of Industrial Relations did not answer questions about delayed wage theft investigations. On the Friday afternoon before the New Year’s holiday, the Department of Health Care Services sent out a notice walking back changes to its bidding process for insurers under Medi-Cal, the state’s health care program for poor people. A CalMatters reporter followed up with questions about why the department changed course, whether it was related to a possible lawsuit by insurance providers left out of the process and when patients would be notified. The department said its “statement speaks for itself” until after the holiday, but never responded when the reporter followed up. Sacramento television station KCRA aired a story last year about criminal groups skimming food benefits and welfare funds at ATMs, for which the Department of Social Services did not respond to questions about fraud prevention efforts. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ahead of the end of California’s COVID-19 state of emergency last month, a CalMatters reporter asked the Department of Public Health for an interview to discuss widening racial and ethnic gaps in vaccination rates and the state’s long-term strategy for managing the coronavirus. The department did not respond until after the story was published, in a written statement which acknowledged, “We know we missed your deadline, but hopefully this information is still useful and of value for you!” Multiple news outlets, including CalMatters and the Los Angeles Times, covered the Department of Education’s highly unusual rollout of long-delayed state test scores last October. It included holding a short briefing for reporters before providing them with any of the results and then releasing the data on a Sunday morning, embargoed for the next day, severely limiting their opportunity to reach school officials to discuss the scores before they became public. A department spokesperson said their timeline was constrained because they wanted to release the state scores alongside results from another federal exam. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Department of Public Health turned down numerous interview requests and often refused to answer specific questions for a series of stories in 2021 by CalMatters, online news site LAist and San Diego radio station KPBS about failures in state oversight of nursing home, including allowing a nursing assistant to stay on the job for more than three years after he was accused of sexually assaulting a patient. “These message control practices do real harm to the public interest,” Loy said. “Because the people need to know the full story, not just the official story.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No standard communications policy: There is no shortage of people responsible for the state government’s communication of public information: 435 employees in the executive branch, to be exact, according to a count conducted for CalMatters by the Department of Human Resources. An analysis of salary ranges based on job titles found that the annual cost to taxpayers is between $36.5 million and $44.8 million. There are even more press aides working for other branches, such as the Legislature, the judiciary and public universities. The jobs of these communications officials extend beyond answering reporters’ questions and can include duties such as developing public relations strategies, writing speeches and managing social media accounts. Yet, besides laws mandating open meetings and the release of public records, California does not have standards for appropriate public communications. Policies are at the discretion of those hundreds of individual agencies and departments. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A spokesperson for Newsom said his administration has not issued any directives for communication by state officials, either to standardize practices or to address problems raised by the press corps. State agencies are part of the governor’s administration and their leaders are gubernatorial appointees. In addition, there are seven departments or offices that are supervised by statewide elected officials, including the attorney general and the secretary of state.But the governor’s office does get involved with the response to the most notable media inquiries and records requests. “As is the case across all aspects of the administration, including communications, policy and legislation, there is an expectation that departments and agencies flag high profile issues for attention for the governor’s office,” spokesperson Anthony York said in an email. “That’s also true for legal matters, including public records act requests. We trust agencies to use their discretion to notify the governor’s office as they see fit, depending on the issue.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly, left, speaks to the media after receiving the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles on March 11, 2021. California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly, left, speaks to the media after receiving the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles on March 11, 2021. ,Newsom has faced criticisms of his own for his press strategy, including favoring the national media over California journalists for interviews and major announcements, which has contributed to speculation, repeatedly denied by the governor, that he is raising his profile to run for president. His office is also highly secretive about his schedule and travel compared to governors in other states, as The Sacramento Bee recently reported, and staff has on occasion physically blocked journalists from approaching Newsom to ask questions at public events, including the Capitol tree lighting ceremony in December and a march to his second inauguration in January. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 the California 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 years investigating health and safety failures at 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.”“These message control practices do real harm to the public interest. Because the people need to know the full story, not just the official story.” -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DAVID LOY, LEGAL DIRECTOR OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT COALITION: Anna Maria Barry-Jester covered public health in California for 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 from rising syphilis rates to the coronavirus vaccine rollout to wastewater surveillance for COVID-19.https://calmatters.org/politics/2023/04/public-information-california-press/