Daily Bread for 4.18.22: The Opportunistic Use of Open-Government Principles

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see a bit of snow with a high of 39.  Sunrise is 6:06 AM and sunset 7:41 PM for 13h 34m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 96% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 2018, The New York Times and the New Yorker win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for breaking news of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal.

---

 In a thread on Twitter, Prof. Don Moynihan of Georgetown writes of a partisan group’s use of open government claims opportunistically rather than universally. In Moynihan’s illustration, book-banners are cloaking themselves in open-government garb merely to gain power and thereafter restrict speech and transparency. His thread offers lessons derived from an effort in Texas to ban library books. See Censorship battles’ new frontier: Your public library.

Four of his lessons appear below:

Wallace, the person leading the book banning effort is appointed to the Library’s governance structure, along with others who are not library users.

Lesson #2: the purpose is political control and deconstruction of public institutions, they don’t care about its core mission.

….

Lesson #5: The goal is to replace transparent democratic processes and professional judgment with activist veto power.

….

Lesson #7: they don’t care about the damage they are doing to public institutions, or the erosion of public services people value and depend on.

….

Lesson 10: professional qualifications are devalued, diversity of representation is a fig leaf used to justify hegemonic control

 In the Llano, Texas case, the book-banners are ideologically-motivated populists.

There are, however, other groups that also use open-government principles selfishly and particularly. The most obvious situation would be traditional special interest groups (business or trade) seeking regulatory capture. They demand information and access only until they control an agency. For them, transparency is merely another slogan on the way to dominating public institutions for private ends.

If a group does not advocate for open government consistently and even-handedly, they don’t really believe in open government.

---

How Russia’s Disinformation Spreads Beyond Its Borders: