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This is a story about a skirmish in the eternal struggle for information between reporters and the governments they cover, and about the value of professional journalism.
The story begins on March 13, when Gov. Steve Sisolak declared a state of emergency and ordered non-essential businesses closed until the threat from the new coronavirus had subsided. When would the governor know that time had arrived? To make that determination, he would need data.
It was presumably around that time that the Nevada Hospital Association (NHA) began compiling for the governor’s office a daily report of COVID-related data from each of its member hospitals. For a variety of reasons — some legitimate and some not — getting information out of hospitals is notoriously difficult. But once the reports were provided to government officials, they became subject to potential release under the Nevada Public Records Act.
Michael Scott Davidson of the Las Vegas Review-Journal was working on a story about the impact of the pandemic on Nevada hospitals. On April 22, he got his hands on one of the daily NHA reports, courtesy of a confidential source. Two weeks earlier, he had submitted his first public records request seeking copies of the reports. Now he knew precisely what was in them.
The government didn’t respond to Davidson’s request within five business days, which it is required to do under the state public records law. When he notified the governor’s office about the infraction, a legal analyst told him it would take eight to ten weeks to compile and send the reports. Realistically, it should only have taken eight to ten seconds to send the reports — already pre-compiled by NHA — as an attachment to an email message.
One of the weaknesses of the Public Records Act is it requires requestors to sue for relief when public officials unlawfully withhold records. So it looked like Davidson and the Review-Journal were only going to get the reports by making the $10,000-plus financial commitment that public-records litigation requires. And litigation takes time — too much time for a fast-moving story like this.
But Davidson had another trick up his sleeve. He decided to use his question time at one of the governor’s press conferences to ask why it was taking the government eight to ten weeks to release the reports. “I covered Sisolak when he was a Clark County Commissioner and he was always very transparent, so I thought he would be surprised by the situation,” Davidson told me.
He was right.
“I don’t know who told you it will take two months to produce the report,” Sisolak said in response to Davidson’s question. “We will get them to you in as timely a manner as possible, and I will ask about your request if someone told you eight weeks.”
Government employees got the message. The day after the press conference, a Southern Nevada Health District official got back to Davidson and said the reports would be released by May 15. Turns out he didn’t have to wait even that long. The reports were sent to the Review-Journal on May 4, less than 24 hours after Davidson’s story about his efforts to obtain them was published in that Sunday’s paper. (The reports were ultimately provided by the Washoe County Health District, the third government agency that received one of the public records requests.)
The story Davidson was working on was finally published on May 13. It clearly demonstrated that “most local acute care hospitals never came close to being overwhelmed” as state health officials had feared. Nevada Chief Medical Officer Dr. Ihsan Azzam said that was the result of social distancing measures mandated by the governor.
Davidson’s struggle to get the hospital reports is the kind of routine battle for information that takes place behind the scenes between public officials and journalists in every state. It starts with an immutable fact of life: Governments want to control information. It’s what they do. Complaining about it would be like complaining about dogs chasing squirrels. It’s just their nature.
On the other hand, journalists want information. That’s their nature. They want to serve readers by reporting on the government, and they want to do it with facts, not speculation or conjecture. It’s why government documents are the holy grail of journalism.
Fortunately, in this country we have laws limiting the information the government can keep secret. Those laws can have limited usefulness, however, when public officials are committed to concealing information. We’re fortunate in this state to have a governor who is committed instead to transparency. And dogged reporters like Davidson who will settle for nothing less than the facts.