Article archive / February 1, 2014
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 6. Source pages: 2.
It’s a journalist’s job to be a snoop. The late Nicholas Tomalin famously said, "The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability."
While I’m not very good at any of these, I’m working to become a better snoop. Sean Lane and his group at LSU who study lies and detection from the cognitive psychology perspective are doing some fascinating work around these behaviors. If you’ve have been following the sociobiologists on the evolved mechanisms for cheating and detection, you see how it fits well with social theory and the Star Wars trilogy.
So recently, when rumbling in LPA led to me being asked, very politely, just how I’d come by the information of who was running for the psychology board, I was a bit surprised. I’m usually the one asking the questions. My first response was to feel flattered. All really good journalists sooner or later become the object of someone else’s detection efforts. Since I’d like to be a good journalist, this seemed like a step in the right direction.
However, then it dawned on me that someone was thinking that something improper had occurred. I’m just as improper as the next person but that rankled me. Board elections are public business.
It didn’t help my bad mood when I got the “protected by attorney-client privilege” from the psychology board director about the supervision issue. I really dislike that answer.
I’m not sure if the rumblings in LPA have been resolved or not, but I sent them a request for documents to see what I can find out about what the heck is going on.
While I was at it, I read the laws again about open meetings and public documents. These are really great laws, and reflect the best of who we are and strive to be in this country.
In their 1940 text, The Law of Newspapers, Arthur and Crosman wrote, “The principle of the freedom of the press as it exists today in this country, and in other democracies, is the result of a long and bitter struggle between those who believed in civil rights and constituted authority which feared the exercise of those rights.” The battle was not only over the individual’s right to speak, write, and publish his thoughts, “but primarily to provide for the people as a whole a means of protecting themselves from the tyranny of arbitrary and oppressive government. In this––the freedom to express dissatisfaction with the acts of government, and to expose improper, illegal, or corrupt acts of governmental officers––lie one of the great purposes of this principle and its tremendous value to all people who live in a democracy.”
Open meetings and public records laws support the inherent right of the public to be informed about how government conducts itself and its affairs. People have an unequivocal right, set forth in the constitution, to know what those in power are doing and why. Court rulings have shown that the Public Records Act must be liberally interpreted to enlarge, rather than restrict, the public’s access to information.
Now I also have the problem of another “attorney-client” protection when it comes to the psychology board explaining the reasoning about why psychology interns can be supervised by people who don’t have a state psychology license.
Of course it relates to Act 251, like the mysterious memo that the board has refused to release, first protected by one legal reason, then protected by another reason. (Mark Twain said, “If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember what you said.”)
Protected by attorney-client privilege? What does that really mean psychologically? “This is really, truly none of your business,” “We refuse to be accountable–go suck an egg,” or “We are cheating.”
I wouldn’t keep asking except for one thing: It is my sincere belief that the board made the wrong decisions and those decisions were made for political reasons and not for valid reasons. I’ve had to sweat it out at the board to try and get answers, but I’m a little wiser now.
Aside from disputes about the supervision of interns, the issue of openness is much more profound.
AA has a great truism: “Secrets make us sick.” The phrase captures both the fact that deception of others can often lead us to self- deception and vice versa, and that either can then lead us to be vulnerable to problems in our relationships, our mental health, or our character.
We aren’t simply responsible for ourselves. As the family-therapists I interviewed for this issue said, nothing exists in isolation.
We are also responsible for the norms of our community.
We should embrace the principles in the open meetings and public records laws, because embedded in those laws are the time-honored principles for living well in a community and a country.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.