Martin County has a problem. While there are large financial and procedural problems both within the City and County governments, what I am concerned about is much more fundamental. It is simply a lack of press coverage on what those governments are actually doing. Without unbiased reporting, citizens have no idea what their governments are doing in their names.

How can citizens possibly be able to keep tabs on their elected officials if they have no idea what is going on? Sure, we have public meetings, but public meetings do no good if the public has no knowledge of what goes on in those meetings. While at least the City of Stuart’s meetings are held in the evening, Martin County Commission meetings are strictly held in the daytime, precluding most people with a job from attending.

The City’s meetings are streamed and can also be watched later online while the County’s meetings can be seen on MC-20. This is not as helpful as it may seem. What I have discovered is that the best way to keep something secret is to give people too much information without context. Until recent years, that context was provided by the local press.  Our current local press corps has failed us miserably in this respect.

While we have very talented opinion writers in the local newspaper, they are not reporters. They give us their opinions with a certain slant. It is valuable and good reading, but it is not a substitute for the good old-fashioned reporting of “who, what, when, where and why” when writing a news story to inform the public. TV journalism is not relevant in Martin County unless it is to report the sensational. Radio has no news component in local reporting at all.

I can’t blame TC Palm/Treasure Coast Newspapers or any television station for no longer being journalistic in the traditional sense. Perhaps it is too much to ask for any one news source to inform the public. The public has turned away from these conventional sources and want their news from social media. But social media has its limitations for a number of reasons, including the lack of verification of the facts.

I have painted a grim picture. But all the “Sunshine” in the world doesn’t help if no one is watching what government is doing. We have become an electorate of opinions absent the facts. It is a place where our prejudices and suppositions cloud our informed decision-making.  So, we re-elect incumbents without knowing their actual records and votes.

This is ultimately not good for local self-government nor for our democracy. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Charles Yancey in 1816:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”