Dear government spokespeople: Please try not to be control freaks | Opinion
Dear government spokespeople,
We don’t work for you.
You might think you know that already, but I’m not sure. Perhaps you don’t understand how journalism works. Maybe that’s inevitable – your numbers have grown in recent years, and ours have dwindled, but our job hasn’t changed, so allow me to explain.
We don’t work for you.
Some of you are rookies: drafted into duties you might not relish, ordered to handle us when you don’t know how. Some of you are political creatures: You don’t care about anything but your definition of winning. That’s fine, but the message is still the same.
We don’t work for you.
Some of you are older: ex-journalists, former colleagues and friends, forced into duties you don’t fully embrace. We get that. We remember. We know you know the score. We know you try to explain it to your bosses. We know they don’t always listen.
Some of you do a good job. We like you. We trust you. We rely on you. Reporters ask questions, and you give answers. If we need more information, you tell us who knows the answers and send reporters to the right people.
Some of you see the job differently. We like you less. You don’t help. You obstruct. You act like hall monitors. You invent rules that don’t exist and tell us every communication to every elected official and public employee must go through you and the gates of your tiny realm.
To be clear, we’re not doing that. Your rules have no force. We don’t need your permission to talk to elected officials and public employees.
We don’t work for you. And by the way, you don’t work for us. If you’d like to apply for a job, feel free.
Sometimes spokespeople are a blessing. The good ones know that arranging interviews and connecting journalists with the right people is part of the deal, and journalists accept that. When we need to check a statistic or clarify a point of procedure, we lean on spokespeople all the time. My co-workers do it. I do it.
At other times, spokespeople are a curse. They hinder communication. They get high on their power.
I’ve worked with plenty of spokespeople in my career. Some are good, some not so much. You can sort them into types.
The ghost
This species used to be more common when government communications departments were smaller, and paid spokespeople were less aggressive.
The ghost’s standard move is silence. Ghosts don’t answer messages from journalists. They ignore texts, emails and phone calls, often because being a spokesperson is the least of their duties. They don’t really want the job, and they only accepted the post because someone had to. Typically, the only way to get a response from a ghost is to be a pest and make so much noise that someone higher up intervenes.
In rare cases, ghosts are hostages, browbeaten by horrible bosses (or lawyers) to keep silent — but that’s a different story. Local ghost examples include some regional fire departments in Pierce County, where finding the spokesperson becomes a maddening puzzle challenge.
The pro
The pro is the best type of spokesperson. Pros are reliable. They answer all messages. They help journalists get information without fuss.
Pros are honest. If they don’t know the answer immediately, they say so. If someone else has the answer, pros connect you. Sometimes pros know the answer but can’t tell you. They explain why, provide a generic quote, and that’s fine. Journalists understand that.
If the answer is tricky, pros will tell you why and make the necessary arrangements to help you get it. In our area (Tacoma and Pierce County), we’re blessed with a handful of pros. This is not a complete list, but Pierce County Sheriff’s spokesperson Carly Cappetto, Tacoma Police spokesperson Shelbie Boyd, and Pierce County Prosecutor’s spokesperson Adam Faber are pros. Thank you for your service. You make our jobs easier.
The gatekeeper
The gatekeeper is the worst type of spokesperson, the sort that kindles newsroom gossip and eye-rolling emojis. Gatekeepers give lip service to transparency even as they undermine it. At best, journalists endure them. Examples include Brionna Aho, communications director for Governor Bob Ferguson, and Maria Lee, spokesperson for the City of Tacoma.
TNT and Olympian reporters have banged their heads against the Brionna Wall occasionally, but we didn’t know how hard until recently, when Axios reporter (and TNT alum) Melissa Santos wrote about the suffocating communications policy from the governor’s office that requires state agencies to seek review and pre-approval for all responses to media questions.
The questions include ordinary matters such as the cost of routine maintenance on an SR 16 highway ramp. When a TNT reporter asked about that last fall to write a brief story (177 words), it took almost two days instead of a few hours to get the answer from the state Department of Transportation: approximately $11,000–$14,000. Yeah, big money.
At the time, we assumed WSDOT spokespeople were just dragging their feet. We were wrong. It turned out the delay came from a different bottleneck.
Santos’s Axios story quoted an internal email from a WSDOT communications official who was trying to answer the TNT reporter’s question quickly, but couldn’t without pre-approval from the governor’s office.
“… It is increasingly difficult to get any actual work done because all our time is spent on sending things in for reviews, tracking reviews and reminding their comms shops of our deadlines,” the official wrote.
Santos, citing the TNT example and many more, asked Aho about the communications policy. The e-mailed response was tone-deaf.
“A new administration has different ways of doing things,” Aho replied. “People are used to doing things a certain way, and change can be hard.”
That’s the tell-tale sound of a gatekeeper.
At the City of Tacoma, spokesperson Maria Lee’s moves are similar. They include quibbling about the placement of city-provided information in a published news story (”several paragraphs down where it made less contextual sense”); submitting 24 comments on another published news story (which was factually accurate); and running a reporter’s pre-publication questions through 51 attorneys who work for city departments. Yes, we get it, gatekeeper — you would have written the story differently to please your bosses.
Gatekeepers might not realize it, but they practice a kind of reverse marketing. They tend to slip into an empire-building mindset. They prefer jargon to plain speaking. They care more about image than truth.
They like to use the phrase “factual error” as a sort of blanket, though they often misuse it. Here’s an example of something that’s not a factual error: You didn’t use our preferred language to explain a government process or action (i.e. something ordinary people don’t like).
That’s not a factual error. Your bureaucratic spin is not a fact. Your preferred tone is not a fact. Facts don’t care about your preferences.
We don’t work for you.
This story was originally published May 31, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Dear government spokespeople: Please try not to be control freaks | Opinion."
.JPG)