Failure to communicate

News Hits is trying to understand. We also want to help.

What we're trying to understand is why Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and his administration are making it so difficult for journalists to obtain information in the fastest, most efficient way possible.

Because, the fact is, we here at the Metro Times have been experiencing a lot of difficulty getting timely answers to legitimate questions. 

If it were just this paper having a problem, we wouldn't be dealing with the issue in print this way. But it's not just a matter of us being excluded from the administration's "A-list" when it comes to media priorities.

It is a problem that extends beyond just us.  And the only conclusion we can reach is that the administration, and the "communications team" headed by Dan Lijana, are too anal-retentive for their own good.

Our message to them is, "Ease up a little and everybody — including you — will be the better for it."

At the heart of the matter is a directive issued by the mayor's Communications Office last year. It stipulates that "staff members" cannot respond to media inquiries, but instead must either "contact a Communications Team Member or take a message to have a Communications Team Member return the phone call."

Part of what's going on, we suspect, is the corporate mentality former businessman Bing has brought to his public sector job. But having a PR person handle the media at a place like Bing Steel is a much different thing than dealing with the daily flood of calls and e-mails from print, TV and radio reporters wanting immediate information on an incredibly wide range of issues.

Now, friction between a mayor and the press happens everywhere. And there's a particularly rich history of that conflict here in Detroit.

Former Mayor Coleman Young freely admitted in his autobiography Hard Stuff that, "I have stubbornly and purposefully withheld information from the media, inviting them to exercise their constitutional recourse and challenge my position with a lawsuit. ... The papers charge that I run the most uncooperative administration in the country, and I say, so be it."

There's no doubt an understandable reason why an administration might want to impose as much control over the information flow as possible.

"Cities are fighting for perception, so people stay there, new companies go there, housing prices stay constant," says Professor Corwin Smidt of Michigan State University's Political Science Department.

> Email Curt Guyette