What a proud day the Record Searchlight enjoyed after it won a 2 1/2-year-long legal battle to obtain records from the Dunsmuir Joint Union High School District and its board.
We’re talking capital-J Journalism.
I’ll never forget the elated whoops, cheers and high fives across the newsroom.
The crux of the issue was the paper sought investigation records regarding alleged bullying and sexual harassment of students by a former superintendent and principal.
For this noble and tenacious journalistic feat, former RS managing editor Greg Clark won a well-deserved 2007 Associated Press Managing Editors Award in the First Amendment category.
The paper was absolutely right to fight for school records that involved investigation of an adult school administrator alleged to have inflicted emotional and sexual abuse upon students. That lawsuit made perfect sense.
Clark was my immediate supervisor; a stellar journalist who traded his 31 years at the Record Searchlight for a job in September as the assistant to Redding’s city manager. A month after Clark left, I was fired by Silas Lyons, the editor who’d had the job for just four months. I mention this to illustrate the newspaper’s new direction.
By the way, Clark’s new position is not to be confused with the assistant city manager, a job last held by Randy Bachman.
Bachman resigned after he admitted having sex “involving the city” – which I suppose is another way of saying he’d had sex on the job with co-workers.
Anyway you say it, a huge mess ensued.
Bachman left in disgrace, followed by other employees who may or may not have been involved with the sex-in-the-city scandal.
And that’s exactly what it was. A horrible, embarrassing, tragic train-wreck of a sexual scandal.
Speaking of train wrecks, enter the Record Searchlight.
Last week the Record Searchlight sued to gain access to the city’s investigative scandal-related reports, cell-phone records and even e-mails.
Why? What’s the point? Who benefits?
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m no apologist for government employees who do the hokey-pokey at work.
But what possible greater public good could come from the RS uncovering yet more lurid sexual details, more names and more heartache?
This lawsuit doesn’t pass the sniff test. It smells like garden-variety dirt-digging, scantily dressed as a First Amendment public’s-right-to-know issue.
This RS lawsuit makes a joke of the California Public Records Act.
Right to know? Let’s not confuse right to know with want to know, or curious to know, or dying to know every last juicy morsel of gossip.
Besides, we already know plenty: Some Redding city employees participated in the ultimate of private acts on public time in the public’s place.
We know, we know, we know.
We also know that those involved were soundly punished and humiliated in the kind of wildly public disgraceful way that nightmares are made of.
All that’s missing are tar, feathers, stocks and whipping posts.
Innocents suffered, too, like spouses, children, friends and families. Careers, reputations and marriages also paid the price.
Meanwhile, the public will pay another kind of price. The lawsuit could result in costly consequences for Redding taxpayers if they wind up funding the mounting legal bills.
Now who’s getting screwed?
