Opinion: Selectboard acts properly

Published in the Mountainview

At Town Meeting, the voters of Middlebury were given the chance to have more control of the way their tax dollars are spent. An advisory vote was taken to assist the Selectboard in deciding whether to continue to fund health and social service agencies from the town's general budget, or to separate the budget and the funding to subject them to separate votes by the residents.

Selectman Fred Copeland suggested that we take advantage of the opportunity to review for ourselves the way we spend those tax dollars. He posed several questions for discussion. I will answer them here.

Would it be a threat to the funding of these organizations? From the experience of neighboring towns which approve their agency funding by other means, the answer is no.

Do the voters want more of a say about their tax burden and the town expenditures? In all likelihood, the funding from the town would be the same. Therefore, the expenditures and taxes would be the same. It would be a different method of getting to the same place.

Would it be too much trouble or too much work for town residents to analyze the budgets of these agencies and decide on our own how they should be funded? Yes. We elect our public officials specifically for the purpose of evaluating large amounts of information and making sensible decisions based on that information and their own experience. The Selectboard are experienced at evaluating budgets of social services agencies; I am not. The Selectboard has paid assistants to help them understand material they receive, and they speak with the voice of the whole town when they ask for information from, or make recommendations to, these agencies. As an individual, even were I to give a large amount of my income to one or more of these agencies. I could not speak with the voice of a powerful legal entity with a large budget.

The Selectboard, as attested by members of the board and by officers of various area health and social services agencies, scrutinizes the annual budgets of each of the agencies which request municipal funding. The Selectboard concerns itself largely with the services provided by that agency to residents of the Town of Middlebury. The Selectboard can suggest, as they did this year, that all agencies only request level funding, rather than increases, due to additional expenses borne by the Town this year. Every agency respected that request.

We have the opportunity to take upon ourselves a greater portion of the burden of self-government. We must commend the Selectboard for offering us that opportunity. We must also know when these issues must be decided as individuals, and when we can delegate that authority to our elected representatives. This time it is the latter. We must encourage the Selectboard to continue to offer us the opportunity to govern ourselves more directly; we must also support them in their efforts to perform the tasks we delegate to them.

In this instance, voters' time would be largely wasted by debating each of the agencies'  funding requests each year at Town Meeting. Most of us would be arguing from positions of anecdotal information, largely unsupported by facts. We would not have read, even once, the annual reports of these organizations whose line-item budgets are examined carefully by our Selectboard. Funding to these organizations would not be threatened substantially, and the democratic process would be subverted by discussion which would change little.

The Selectboard are the proper body to consider funding requests from health and social service agencies. The body politic must support them in their effort. We must also offer our input at every opportunity, so that they may know our opinions when they include the funding for these agencies in the general town budget.

We also must recognize that municipal funding is a small portion of the budgets of these organizations, and we, as members of the public, must support them with our own charitable contributions as well. Kudos to the agencies for their hard work, and to the Selectboard for so ably representing and remaining mindful of the public interest.

Opinion: Caution necessary in news council

Published in the Mountainview

An idea of which all journalists should be aware is a new proposal for "news councils," or bodies which monitor news organizations and the media for ethics and integrity. They are watchdog groups, made up of members of the journalistic professions, which can investigate and censure reporters or media which violate ethical guidelines.

Media censorship or regulation is a concept which should be investigated carefully. It rarely does harm to investigate a solution to a problem, but implementation of solutions should be done with great caution. This is particularly the case when dealing with institutions so close to the core of the American culture as its news gathering and dissemination organizations.

Editorial content of one publication is already subject to public scrutiny and to the challenges of other publications. Most publications have a "Corrections" section where they admit their own errors and provide correct information. This is a form of self-censorship which is productive and appropriate; any newspaper which has a large amount of space devoted to corrections is likely doing a poor job of fact-checking. Further, should one publication fail to correct its own error, other publications are free to (and ethically bound to) report the correct facts.

Outside monitoring (even by a formal intra-industry regulating body) are threats to a free press. Press monitoring goes on all day, all over the world. Individuals receive information from media outlets and evaluate the credibility and usefulness of the information. Into that equation they add their own self-interest, the reportage of the same situation by other information sources, and their genera/ experience with a news reporting agency.

To formalize this implicit interrelationship between media outlets is to formalize a threat to an essential freedom in the American democracy. Left unformalized, regulation is on a low level, bound by ethical considerations but free from the intimidation which a watchdog necessarily imposes. Formalized, the regulation suddenly carries the weight of the world.

When developing a system of regulation, the question must always be posed: "Who watches the watchmen?" As the information dissemination system is currently in use, the answer is "They watch each other, and are equally capable of reporting on violations of public trust." A news council would be accountable to the public. That appears to be a good thing, until we remember that the only effective watchdogs the public has on its side are the media. Each individual cannot go out and research the world and current events; that is specifically why we watch television and read newspapers. With news councils in the system, the answer would be "The regulators watch the reporters, who in turn watch the regulators. However, the regulators, when they speak, speak with a more powerful and legitimated voice than the reporters." This imbalance of power and of access to the public mind is dangerous to freedom of information.

Freedom of information is so important to the American public that we often fail to acknowledge its existence. We often exhibit cynicism and doubt towards the media. Those are both good things. If we inherently understand that freedoms are important, we are unlikely to abridge them. If we question the sources of our information, we will always feel in control of our own minds and opinions. However, if we take for granted that freedoms will always exist, and begin to mistrust the media and suspect it of threatening the public interest, we risk limiting the very instruments we rely on for our own., participation in the wider world.

Imposing regulations on a necessarily free industry is a mistake which must not be made now or in the future. Having bodies which meet to design ethical guidelines is an excellent idea; all newspapers currently have them, in the form of editorial boards. Professional journalists' associations have codes of ethics to which all members must subscribe. The ethics are already in place, and despite disparate sources are very similar codes throughout the world's journalistic organizations. Regulating an industry which is self-regulating and necessarily free is to deny freedom of information and of the press.