On February 2, 2009, Jason Doucette, treasurer of “Friends of Susan 2010, Inc” submitted a Freedom of Information Request for a copy of the “Secretary of State’s current ACT database”. Eight months later, Geoffrey Griswold Fisher of Litchfield, CT, complained to the State Election and Enforcement Commission, apparently about receiving an email from the Bysiewicz campaign. Joan Andrews, Director of Legal Affairs and Enforcement responded that the matter will not be docketed, because if the facts were proven true, they would not “constitute a violation of any law within the Commission’s jurisdiction”. However, she referred the matter to the “Commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services and the Auditor of Public Accounts”.

In order to get a clearer understanding of the issue, I obtained a copy of the database also via a Freedom of Information request. Mr. Fisher has no party registration listed in the database, but does have a special note saying that in 2008 he had contacted the Secretary of State’s office about “Elegibility [sic] of Barack Obama to run for President of the USA”.

I have made my copy of this database available to people who have asked for it, including Republicans arguing against Ms. Bysiewicz eligibility to run for Attorney General. One person who received a copy of the database wrote, “I was actually surprised by how little new or spicy information was in there – shows what I get for buying into the Courant’s hype”.

Yet the Courant has not stopped their hype. Jon Lender of the Hartford Courant has written several articles and blog posts about CRMGate, with his latest coming out Sunday entitled Bysiewicz May Be Interviewed Under Oath In Office Probe; Questions Arise On 'Holiday Card' Listings In Her Database. I’ve added comments to his blog posts criticizing his coverage but they have never appeared on the blog.

His latest concern is that the database has a field entitled ‘CONTACT Holiday Card’, which Fox-61, also part of the Courant Media conglomerate describes as an unusual database field. Lender reports,

Bysiewicz says that this wasn't used to send holiday cards, and that the 5,400 people had sent cards to her office. But about 170 of those people told The Courant they never sent her a card -- and, moreover, got a card or cards from her.

I will be interested to see if any of these people can produce cards like this and whether or not such cards are in fact some sort of inappropriate personal contact or if they are really examples of permissible contact by a state agency to inform constituents about what is happening in the agency. One would think that if it were the former, there would have been other complaints that would have shown up without having to dig around into a constituent relationship database.

In fact, it is very common for personal information management programs, like the one that Secretary of State Bysiewicz was using to contain a field tracking the sending and receipt of holiday cards. While such information might not be as valuable to the agencies operation as information about whether or not the constituent is an elected official or has received copies of the ‘Blue Book’ in the past, to a person that works with databases for tracking customer or constituent relations, there appears nothing irregular about tracking this information.

With that, I would like to provide a slightly more complete view of the database. The database has 140 fields. Twenty four are about the Blue Book that the agency produces. Other fields include information about the electoral process, such as whether or not the contact is a current or former elected official, if they are on the Citizenship Fund Board, and so on. Thirty-six of the fields are never used. The party affiliation field lists 11,588 Democrats, 8,400 Republicans, 399 Other, and 45 unaffiliated. 7,172 contacts have special notes, including 2,771 special notes about Democrats and 982 Republicans. 24,600 contacts are listed as elected officials, including 9,629 Democrats and 7,100 Republicans.

With nearly 37,000 contacts in the database a “birther” or an unscrupulous journalist can easily go on a witchhunt to try and concoct controversy. Personally, as a blogger, I was offended to find that the database only included one reference to a blogger, and it wasn’t myself, or any of the political bloggers I regularly read. Even worse, while the database has 456 entries in the website category, the one blogger listed did not have an entry in the website category.

With that, I am wondering would it be like if we subjected Jon Lender to the same sort of scrutiny that he is giving Secretary of State Bysiewicz. First, it is worth noting that the Secretary of State’s Office’s database has fifteen entries with “Courant” in the Company field, yet Jon Lender is not even in the database. Even Colin McEnroe is in the database, although he is listed as being with WTIC, and not the Courant or Connecticut Public Radio. Perhaps Mr. Lender’s obsession with Ms. Bysiewicz is that he feels slighted and is suffering a narcissistic injury. Perhaps the Secretary of State’s office doesn’t consider Mr. Lender a credible journalist.

I was tempted to entitle this blog post, “No Word on Society of Professional Journalism Ethics Investigation into Jon Lender“. It would be a completely true statement. I have received no word from the Society of Professional Journalism about a possible ethics investigation into Jon Lender. However, such a headline, in my opinion, would be unethical. The Society’s Code of Ethics states, among other things,

Make certain that headlines, news teases and promotional material, photos, video, audio, graphics, sound bites and quotations do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context.

Yet it does seem that Mr. Lender’s latest article, along with several others he has written, is, at best skirting ethical guidelines.

As the person who commented about the database also said to me, “The sad truth is, for all I know about Bysiewicz’s foibles, I don’t know what any of the other candidates think about anything at all… There’s certainly nothing to be gained waiting around for the Courant or related outlets to enlighten us on policy matters.”

Perhaps that’s the most important part of the story. We can question whether or not the Bysiewicz campaign’s use of the database is legal or ethical. We can question whether or not Jon Lender’s reporting is ethical. Yet there seems to be no question that the traditional media has failed in addressing substantive issues in the electoral process.

(Cross-posted at MyLeftNutmeg.)