A judge ordered us to turn over privileged documents
mississippitoday.org
mississippitoday.org
Unfortunately, this allows media to presume guilt and smear the subject while requiring extensive legal cost, pain and suffering, and often little to no recourse, even in court.
I’m not sure about the details of this case, but I have a close family member who the media decided to publish false allegations as fact. The scope of the allegations is large (related to billions of dollars of public money), but they were a salaried employee making less than a new grad at a tech company.
Following the stories, which are picked up and reported by other news outlets, social media runs with it and dumps even more accusations that have no basis in reality.
The end result was they were effectively fired, have to “prove” their innocence in the public square when all information to do so is private and confidential or held by those who made the accusations, and now have to go through life with the burden of extensive local coverage of actions of a false narrative. While they retained legal counsel, the cost and time to correct the record is likely out of their reach.
This has made me extremely skeptical of news outlets and what agendas might be pushing the stories they are publishing. It may not even be the reporters fault- they are given a juicy document dump that doesn’t tell the entire story and then they infer the worst about the subject. Once that’s done there is seemingly little a normal person can do to fight back.
1. Americans (in particular) often bemoan how inefficient the government is as a reason to cut government services. In truth, government progrtams are designed to fail. This is a highly successful strategy called "starving the beast" [1].
As an example, in 1996 then-president Clinton enacted welfare reform. One provision replaced a Federal program caleld Aid to Families with Dependent Children ("AFDC") with state block grants to a new program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families ("TANF"). This allows the state to decide how that many is spent. This has been a disaster for getting aid to those that need it [2] and much more inefficient.
It's this kind of thing that enabled Mississippi's welfare corruption.
2. A lot of effort has been spent and is still being spent to essentially divert federal funds to private (typically religious) institutions. That includes TANF blcok grants but, more importantly, the issue of "school choice", which is really just diverting education funds to religious schools.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
[2]: https://copolicy.org/news/tanfs-cautionary-tale-about-block-...
As a parent of four kids in public schools, less money is spent by the state on kids in choice programs and in most self selected charter schools. That seems like a win-win - parents get to choose schools that meet their educational needs, the public pays less in taxes to educated kids outside of the public school system.
My wife was a public school teacher, my mom was a public school teacher. Public schools are great for many, but their cost per pupil are in line with high end private schools and for the median students I don’t think they provide a better experience. In our area less than half of what the state gives a public school for a student is available as a voucher.
Unfortunately when a public school cannot provide a FAPE (special needs, social issues, etc.), without school choice the burden falls on the parents.
Charter schools cherry pick students (eg they don't generally have to deal with the added expense of special needs students), tend to have more students from more affluent families (so less remedial teaching, which is more expensive), pay their teachers less (overall on average) and give less job protections to teachers.
Additionally, charters have a severe lack of accountability and a huge fraud and waste problem [1].
If the public schools in your area are "failing", it's because they've been set up to fail. Starve them of resources and sell the voters on private, unaccountable schools.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/12/10/new-repo...
I also never said our public schools were failing, just that they have cost equivalent to private schools without any of the benefits.
I’m sure there are terrible charter and private school, just like there are terrible business. With a terrible business, I can go elsewhere. My community is stuck with a public school regardless of its quality.
Public schools also have little accountability and their monolithic structure amplifies bad decisions across cities. For example, my children’s school chose a math curriculum and purchased a seven year contract approved by “accountable” parties. Every year since that curriculum was adopted math scores in the district have declined. An entire generation is failing to be properly educated in basic math fundamentals!
The school district is flush with resources for everything but teachers and students. Want to put new technology in all of the classrooms and give a superintendent who failed all his metrics a raise? Sure. Maybe we’ll have money for teacher raises and a working math curriculum next year.
If a charter school costs the state less money (which even district run charters do), to pull out a portion of the population to meet their specific needs, why would you be against that? That leaves more money for special education.
I have skin in the game. I have a highly gifted child working two grades ahead in math (he went to a different district that could meet his needs). I have two students who need outside tutoring, one of which qualifies for special education services, and a fourth who would succeed in any environment you put him in. I’ve had to fight to get services required by law for my kids in a district that is supposedly working as intended by public school advocates. My wife taught in the district our kids attend. We are constantly discussing whether we should move them to private or charters that would better meet their needs or continue to fight the bureaucratic public school district.
If you don’t have school age kids and just read news articles, you probably don’t understand what parents go through when their kids don’t fit the slot the public schools provide for them. As someone living it, I’m happy that parents are able to find schools that fit their family’s needs, have resources from the state to attend them, and those resources cost me less as a taxpayer. If we had an option that suited us, we would take it.
Mississippi welfare scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_welfare_funds_sc...
Mississippi Today’s reporting on the scandal: https://mississippitoday.org/the-backchannel/
Meanwhile more traditional agencies will require you be employed by as a full time journalist and require the agency you are reporting for to submit on your behalf.
In general the only people who are afforded reporter's privilege are media companies large enough to have lawyers versed in its nuance and able to defend it.
And the only people consider press are those acting on behalf of a recognized and respected new agency.
Don't. Face the consequences. You chose to fight on this hill. Giving up your sources is immoral.
And that there is always a risk of a government trying to overstep and get privileged information they shouldn’t.
No amount of laws are going to really stop this from happening if a corrupted government is driven enough.
I am wondering if there is a way that this could be solved with technology so they could say, it’s impossible to comply.
Something like after published it’s encrypted and inaccessible but then that defeats storing it in the first place if you can’t decrypt it and if you can you can be compelled.
Maybe it’s not realistic but a thought I have had especially comparing to some other situations where the government wanted some data but it was impossible to comply thanks to encryption.
It's easier to convince an American court to require something than it is to convince both American, Russian and Chinese courts.
"Reporters privilege"
It's also just common sense. If you make it easy for anyone to sue a journalist in a way that requires them to reveal their confidential sources, the sources are no longer confidential, and people in the future won't feel safe sharing information with journalists for fear of being exposed through bogus lawsuits.
It's in the category of "you better have a damn good probable cause" if you want to forcibly intervene with publishing.