Bishop's chief of staff responds to BFM ban

I'm going to go a bit off-topic here and discuss a blogosphere-only issue here. Earlier today, Christine Barry, who is one of the leading lights of Blogging for Michigan, noted that state Senate computers had been blocked from accessing BFM. It's made to the front page of Daily Kos. The decision was made by Matt Miner, chief of staff to the Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester. The relevant four paragraphs are as follows:

It is probably the first of several blocks to be instituted. The Senate blocks many websites from its users that it deems inappropriate. We believe Senate employees are to be doing the work of the people, not surfing the web and posting politically motivated propaganda. Recent national reports show that people spend 40-60 minutes a day surfing the web. We don't believe that to be an acceptable use of time. When certain sites are utilized by users in the system to promote political propaganda, we deem that an inappropriate use of taxpayer resources, not to mention unethical.

Taxpayers pay employees of the Senate to help them with problems, answer questions about state government and most importantly spend taxpayers money in an appropriate fashion. Obviously, a number of individuals (whose salaries are paid for at taxpayer expense) were accessing bloggingformichigan.com during business hours when they should be doing more appropriate work or else this wouldn't be an issue.

I fully support individuals engaging in political dialogue and having the freedom to post messages that express their views, but when it comes to them using a publically owned server and taxpayer's money I will err on the ethical side. If you were to ask the average citizen if they thought paying an individual with their tax dollars to surf the web and post messages and pictures was an appropriate use of time and money, I would bet they would say no.

A long time ago someone told me that if you ever wonder if something you're doing is wrong, you should ask yourself 'Is this something I would want my boss to see?'. I would modify that a bit for this situation. I would ask 'Would taxpayers approve of me doing this?'. In the event that someone presents me with a viable reason to utilize the Senate server to access this site, I will be sure to take it off the list.

I sent a follow up asking why only a progressive blog is, at this point, blocked. He responded that another progressive blog, MichiganLiberal.com, remains unblocked from access. And, he reiterated that Senate staffers, who work ultimately for constituents, shouldn't be engaging in political advocacy while on the public dime.

This last is a good, valid point -- progressives have complained long and loud about the politicization of the federal government under President Bush, and allowing the work of state Senate offices to be co-opted for purely partisan purposes during work hours is really very similar. If I found out that the staff for my state Senate were spending their work hours engaging in partisan organizing, I wouldn't be pleased. That would include advocacy on issues not directly related to the senator's position -- say, one of my state Senator's staffers spent his time doing work for various right to life organizations.

I disagree with the execution, and strenuously. I have to be careful because Michigan Liberal, to which I'm a regular contributor, tends towards even greater partisan organizing and I certainly don't endorse blocking access to that. And, it's true that progressives have been better than conservatives in terms of using the 'Net for the purposes of organizing -- one need only realize that this weekend is the Yearly Kos convention. On the other hand, I think politicians should acquaint themselves with a wide range of perspectives and opinions, and I think good blog posts help provide that, especially these days when most both the quality and quantity of media coverage is on the decline. I don't know how much time and energy Senate staffers actually devoted to online organizing or advocacy; on the other hand, there is utility in having access to different ideas and perspectives during the course of the day.

So, his ultimate point is probably fairly reasonable, but I wouldn't have started with Blogging for Michigan. But, more to the point, I wouldn't have blocked anything on the grounds that you can find useful information and perspective among the political organizing, but would have figured out a different way to address the problem -- perhaps raising the issue directly with the senators whose staff were doing political organizing on taxpayer time and money.

Update, 7:35 a.m.--There are two comments worth addressing here, because they're related in some ways.

Christine, whose blog got banned, says first that there isn't anything on the site that qualifies as wasting time, and then equates writing press releases with participating on blogs.

I apply the Cropsey standard. Alan Cropsey is my state senator and is a flat-out, rightwing loon. During his first term, he stood on the floor to denounce Michigan's two U.S. senators for holding up federal judicial nominees -- talk about wasting time on the taxpayer dollar. The Cropsey standard is how I'd feel if I learned what his staff does during its work day; if I found out that staffers who were supposed to be serving constituents were instead posting on anti-global warming blogs, I'd be pretty miffed. I'd also wonder whether it would be possible for someone who disagreed with the senator's policy decisions to get any kind of decent service on unrelated matters. This is a misuse of taxpayer dollars, and engenders cynicism in government. It's worth noting that this doesn't apply to communications people or people working in party offices, who are by nature more political. Keeping tabs on what people are saying, and building support for their employer's policies is certainly legitimate workplace behavior.

Based on that, I think the ultimate reasoning offered by Bishop's chief of staff has a valid point. His story changed somewhat yesterday, and even his first response -- that people were saying bad things about the senator -- rings fairly hollow. Michigan Liberal, a more widely read site, routinely says mean, nasty things about the senator and his party (I don't; then again, I prefer to blog about issues, not personalities).

If you were to apply the Cropsey standard to Blogging for Michigan, I don't think you could support a block. Although there is a fair amount of criticism, most of what you find on the front page has real journalistic value. I don't read through all the posts (not all of them hit the front page) or comments, so I can't say that Senate staffers haven't engaged in activities that would violate the Cropsey standard, but the front page is pretty legitimate.

Chet (Chetly?) says that because it has an overt partisan mission and because he's (as a conservative, or libertarian, or whatever label Chetly applies to himself) not allowed to post there, that the senator's staff was right to block it. This is mostly related to the comments, the policy for which makes clear that the site's purpose is to build the progressive community through news, commentary, and conversation.

What of BFM's restriction of comments to only progressives? Does this not constitute discrimination? No, of course it doesn't. Media outlets set their own standards of what kinds of consumer comment they will publish all the time. The First Amendment gives you the right to express yourself, but it doesn't give you the right to stake to trespass on private property, which is what Chet/Chetly is, in effect, demanding. Media outlets, especially newspapers, set standards for letters to the editor traditionally based on length and with the basic requirement that the author provide information to verify their identity, but they also apply criteria that might -- to some -- to be arbitrarily based or unfair to one point of view.

Further, this cuts both ways. Rush Limbaugh has the reputation for weeding out liberals so they didn't get on air. Bill O'Reilly has a reputation for cutting the mics of people he disagrees with. Unless the state Senate is about to start blocking access to these media figures, your only argument is that Blogging for Michigan and, to a lesser extent, Michigan Liberal [Mich. Lib. has allowed conservatives to post in the past, including Chetly, who was banned for reasons that we're not going to get into -- either here, or in comments (Chetly, take this as your one and only warning in this respect)], comes right out and says what they'll accept.

Further, under this narrow interpretation, the Senate would have to block both Talking Points Memo, which features progressive news gather and broke -- most recently -- the U.S. attorney's scandal, and National Review Online (not to mention other ideologically bent news gathering organizations that have, in the last couple of years, moved to the Web like the Weekly Standard, The Nation, or even The New Republic). TPM started out as Josh Marshall's blog, and NRO's The Corner revolutionized group blogging.

The question, really, is what constitutes legitimate journalism, even journalism with an ideological bent, and what constitutes party building and partisan organizing. Blogging for Michigan is the first, not the second.

There is another issue that I haven't seen addressed anywhere. Blogging for Michigan had just started a series of posts, authored by Democrats in the state Senate, of what the state could be dealing with instead of standing at budgetary impasse. I don't know the status of these pieces of commentary now, but it would seem more difficult for individual senators to make their opinions on these things known. The timing of this ban raises the uncomfortable question of whether this conversation has been unduly chilled.