This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Since the Utah Legislature's failed attempt to change the Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA), legislators have gone on the offensive, blaming the media for misrepresenting the bill, which would have made it more difficult for the public to peruse public records and almost impossible to find out what lawmakers are up to.

Several legislators have accused the press of "fanning the flames" of public outrage, which forced the Legislature to repeal the bill it hastily passed in the waning days of the 2011 legislative session. And they have painted themselves as lambs being prepared for the slaughter, with the hulking media poised to expose their entire private lives in a sensational way and destroy their families.

It's all bunk, which raises the question: Why are they going to such lengths to mislead the public on this issue?

The right-wing Red Meat Radio, co-hosted by Sen. Howard Stephenson and Rep. Greg Hughes, both R-Draper, on K-TALK on Saturday mornings, used almost its entire two-hour program after the repeal of HB477 to bash the press for its stories and commentaries on HB477 and to make Chicken Little predictions that the demise of the bill will destroy mankind as we know it.

Hughes was out of town and not there for that particular program. But Stephenson and invited guests Rep. Holly Richardson, R-Pleasant Grove; Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab; and Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley City; agreed on what will happen if the law isn't changed. They complained they will have to turn over all their private communications, including any intimate text messages to their spouses and children, to a vulturous media engaging in fishing expeditions with their GRAMA requests intended only to embarrass the lawmakers.

They also lamented that the mountain of media requests for legislators' communications has required hundreds of hours of staff time.

Those claims are patently, and provably, false.

A Salt Lake Tribune records request of the Legislature last week revealed that only 10 GRAMA requests were made of the Legislature in 2010, and some of those were denied on the grounds they didn't meet the standard of public information under the GRAMA law.

In other words, private communications by lawmakers that do not involve the public's business are already protected.

The current law also requires those seeking public documents to pay the expenses of researching, retrieving and copying the documents, although some agencies have waived the fees voluntarily.

The legislators on K-TALK lamented a Utah Supreme Court case in which justices ruled the Deseret News could review documents related to a sexual harassment complaint in Salt Lake County.

They said the wording of the decision meant records had to be turned over simply on the grounds the public may be interested in them, rather than meeting the public interest standard.

(Reporters and judges and GRAMA.

Oh my!

Reporters and judges and GRAMA.

Oh my!)

But records requests have been denied on privacy grounds since that Supreme Court ruling, a fact conveniently omitted from the legislators' discussion.

Richardson, advancing the "Apocalypse Now" scenario, said she "had heard" of a case in California where a police officer was forced to turn over private text communications and that "she heard" he ended up committing suicide.

The only case that comes close to that description is The City of Ontario vs. Quon, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the city had a reasonable right to review its police officers' text messages on city-issued pagers because of the appearance of overuse.

It turned out that Quon and others were using taxpayer-funded pagers to send multiple sexually explicit images and messages during work hours. And there was no suicide.

So this is the example the Utah Legislature wants to cite for the argument against any access to their text messages?

I would hope not.

Contact Paul Rolly at prolly@sltrib.com —