March 6, 2000

If I was in the middle of Prince William Sound on my boat and I stepped over the railing and walked on the water to shore, this newspaper would report, "Cowdery Can't Swim."

That's exactly what you did to the Privatization Commission Report. It showed the need for "task based budgeting" and a process to segregate "inherently governmental responsibilities" from less important ones. It contained 408 recommendations to improve state government. Of course, no one could agree with all of them. But, there's certainly enough there for worthwhile public debate. Yet, when presented with this volume of public input, your newspaper at first ignored it and then wrote inflammatory accusations while still ignoring its valuable content.

Your headline was inflammatory and not supported by your story. The two overarching recommendations in the study were about the unfriendly state budget format and a proposal to identify necessary from unnecessary government activities. These topics are the heart and soul of the report and your article never touched on them. You missed the story! Your readers are poorer for not being exposed to this useful information.

Your lead paragraph had lurid accusations of "sweetheart deals," "conflicts of interest," and "vote packing." There were no deals to be had, sweetheart or otherwise. The subsequent paragraphs said nothing about deals. It was mentioned only as an attention-grabber, like yellow journalism used to do.

In the beginning we sought legal opinions from the Ethics Committee and Legislative Legal Services to confirm that conflicts of interest provisions do not apply to volunteers. Summarily, there is no conflict of interest when a person doesn't have decisional authority to take self-benefiting action. Nevertheless, advocates for state employee unions beat the conflict-of-interest drum throughout the whole process. They charged a woman who chaired the subcommittee on Corrections with conflict of interest because she formerly worked for a private company in the corrections business. In fact, her 25 year career has been in health care and social services. She spent merely 10 months working for a corrections company and she wasn't working for them when she chaired our subcommittee. The Department of Corrections liaison went on record complimenting her for doing a good and fair job. We gave you these facts. You ignored them.

You charged that the Education subcommittee "recommended public funding for private schools." In fact, they recommended, "to put before the voters some variation of a voucher system for public and private schools." Your truncated version gave a distinctly different color to the recommendation.

It is true that our education chairman manages a private school. Most of our volunteers had some expertise and experience in the subject matter of their committees. If they didn't, their recommendations would be less valuable. Surely, you would have criticized us for lack of relevant experience on our subcommittees. Again, the Department of Education representative gave our chairman high marks for fairness and dedication to the task. Instead of reporting on the pros and cons of a school voucher system, and other recommendations, you attacked the people who made them.

You charged that, "a report concluding one state agency was doing a good job was tossed out and replaced with recommendations mirroring (my views)." It suggests we were trying to make the departments look bad. In fact we worked with several subcommittees to eliminate reports about irrelevant prejudices against the Governor's administration.

The report in question was authored by Mr. Ric Davidge without participation from anyone else on his four member subcommittee or the larger 25 member committee. My staff gave him a written critique. We told him, "your attempt to use this report as a forum to further Commissioner Sedwick's complaints about International Trade and Tourism is way off base." After preventing political harangues against the Governor, my staff wasn't about to let Mr. Davidge harangue me. He changed three or four sentences and resubmitted the report which was then considered in full by the full subcommittee. To claim that the report was tossed is out is a gross distortion.

Your article was an insult to about 300 people who donated many hours of their time to try and do something good. Your reporter admitted she didn't read the report. She merely collected whatever negative criticisms she could find. If there is a silver lining in this tawdry journalistic episode it is that we are alerted to the need for a public debate on the role of journalism in a free society. It's time to ask what role our state's largest newspaper is playing in Alaskans' life.

For the record, I can swim but I can't walk on water.

John Cowdery

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