Chris Christie’s War on Press Seen as Bridgegate Retaliation
The restricted distribution of this information was a major contributor to public corruption because the covert notices about the availability of these money making opportunities could be used to reward donors to political campaigns and as a means of generating kickbacks to the politicians involved.
Under New Jersey’s landmark bill, state, county and municipal officials (and private parties required to publish public notices) would no longer be required to publish such notices in local newspapers, allowing them to post such notices on their own individual websites. Proponents of the plan say that it could save New Jersey up to $80 million a year. Opponents of the bill believe that the new law could enable officials to reward publications that support their agendas by giving them paid notices while withholding paid notices to publications that did not support those agendas. If approved, New Jersey would be the first state to repeal the legal ad requirement.
Christie’s office contends more than $80 million is paid annually by taxpayers and private businesses to publish legal notices. The governor’s office said it based its figure off of “an internal tally of a sampling for daily newspapers.” The New Jersey Press Association says that legal ads are a $20 million revenue source for the struggling newspaper business in their state, which the governor would like to hurt. Without that revenue, 300 jobs could be eliminated based on an average salary benefits package and payroll taxes of $65,000 per employee, White said.
The campaign for and against the bill ramped up in earnest Friday night, when Christie launched a barrage of tweets against Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen) and Sen. Robert Gordon (D-Bergen) after they expressed concern in a press release that “the legislation is reportedly being pushed by the governor to exact revenge on the press whose investigative reporting helped to uncover Bridgegate and the involvement of the governor’s staff.”
There is a widespread assumption in New Jersey that Christie, who has a reputation for being a vindictive politician, is publicly supporting the bill to retaliate against local weekly newspapers that broke the Bridgegate scandal that cost Republican Governor any shot at getting a major position (or any position at all) in the incoming Trump administration.
The legislation is being touted by proponents as a cost saving measure, noting that it doesn’t prevent government officials from posting legal notices but merely gives them the option of choosing whether to publish them in the newspaper.
While the bill doesn’t require New Jersey officials to refrain from publishing newspaper public notices, government notices only account for 20 percent of the total value of public notice advertising, the bulk of which comes from private party advertisements. The proposed legislation makes no provision for those advertisements.
“Hundreds of newspaper employees dedicated to keeping your officials honest will lose their jobs and dozens of towns will lose their community newspapers if the bill is passed,” according to the editorial in the Asbury Park Press, one of Gannett’s papers. “Don’t let them get away with it.” Most of the Gannett-owned daily newspapers took the unusual step Saturday of running front-page editorials urging lawmakers to vote down the bill
12/20/2016 @ 10:17 am
Allowing government agencies to post notices only on their websites – of which there are hundreds – presupposes that everyone who might be interested in those notices is going to visit all 500 plus website on a weekly basis. That will never happen. What will happen, instead, is that politicians will tell their cronies where to look and when to look for the juicy deals they might want to bid on. Another failure of democracy in action.