Squeaky wheels get grease: CCA posting oral arguments again

Grits had been complaining to court staff about the failure to post videos of Texas Court of Criminal Appeals oral arguments for a couple of months. But they only, finally began posting the video after I publicly wrote about it on the blog last week.

Since your correspondent is both a public-policy advocate and also media, in a sense, I'm frequently afforded a unique perspective when these sorts of situations arise.

There is a telling pattern regarding how government agency leaders and politicians respond to advocates vs. how they respond to the media. Grits gets to see both.

Say a problem exists in government (any problem, pick a problem), but the only people aware of it are those trying to manage it. As an advocate deep in the weeds on policy, one becomes aware of problems about which the general public may not know. As a general model, an advocate might tell the folks in charge of the situation about the problem and, where feasible, recommend solutions. That's the job.

The smartest agency heads will admit mistakes instead of cover them up and attempt to fix the situation then. But most are not the smartest. Most are average. Indeed, by definition, half are below average! And so the typical response is to ignore the problem and stonewall advocates.

Things are different for the media, because drawing outside attention to an issue creates political pressures and hassles, highlighting failures the agency would rather conceal, either from voters or the people controlling its purse strings. So, the Houston Chronicle's Keri Blakinger might see the Texas Department of Criminal Justice act on concerns in her articles when the same problems raised by Jennifer Erschabek of the Texas Inmate Family Association were more easily ignored.

Grits sees this a lot. My go to move as an advocate is not to immediately run to the blog and flame anyone who's not doing what I prefer. There have been plenty of instances when Grits has identified a some glitchy, technical problem in government, shared it with someone in charge, and it was fixed without my ever having discussed it on the blog. By the time I'm writing about such matters, frequently it's out of exasperation, grumpy that I'm having to use political capital to pressure someone to do their job, when quietly fixing the situation would have avoided conflict.

That's sort of the dynamic here. I've been asking the CCA to post this material since before the October episode of Reasonably Suspicious. We had hoped to cover the James Calvert case, argued in September, in a podcast segment. By the November episode, it was still not available. Last week, once more I asked when the files would be posted and was told there was an indefinite delay, that there was no way to tell when they might resolve technical problems. Since the court is, after all, required by statute to post the video, Grits reported that news. And lo and behold, the Calvert file was posted online Monday.

For the record, thank you to CCA and Office of Court Administration staff who finally got these posted. But wouldn't have it been easier and less embarrassing to behave with similar alacrity two months ago when I first inquired?