Mike Parson, the governor of Missouri. (Office of Missouri Governor/Flickr)
A few months ago, a data journalist and designer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch came across something stunning—a website that exposed Social Security numbers for teachers across the state of Missouri, directly in the source code.
This revelation, and the quick fix needed to resolve the issue, helped protect the privacy of tens of thousands of people. But when given a chance to credit the journalist for his work, the governor of the state, Mike Parson, decided to attack him instead and threaten him with legal action.
The move, which was widely mocked, essentially forced the journalist’s silence on the matter for months as Parson repeatedly attacked him in the media, in the process leading to public questions about Parson’s own tech literacy.
(Of course, it later came out that they were going to commend him until it was seen as more politically expedient to trash him.)
Despite Parson’s own efforts to vilify him, prosecutors decided not to follow through on the governor’s threats—allowing the journalist, Josh Renaud, to finally speak out in public about his treatment last week.
https://twitter.com/Kirkman/status/1492291919224922113
Renaud had a lot to say in a personal statement that was clearly published with an eye toward highlighting the injustice of this governor, clearly obsessed with modest political gain over the rights of his citizens.
“This was a political persecution of a journalist, plain and simple,” Renaud wrote. “Despite this, I am proud that my reporting exposed a critical issue, and that it caused the state to take steps to better safeguard teachers’ private data.”
Renaud acted in good faith, and his newspaper stood behind him throughout this nerve-wracking process. But despite the fact that a prosecutor declined to charge Renaud, the governor’s office is standing behind its take that he somehow did something wrong. (Per the Springfield News-Leader, the governor’s spokeswoman described the prosecutor’s decision as “her prerogative.”)
The thing is, though, that Renaud’s comments on the overall incident may be more damaging to the governor than anything that Parson and his spokesperson could have ever anticipated. Renaud took aim at a recent incident involving the state senate failing to confirm his choice to lead the Department of Health and Senior Services, Donald Kauerauf, over his stances on tools like vaccines and masking.
Kauerauf, simply put, was a victim of political circumstance, in the governor’s view … which Renaud was able to directly connect to his own situation.
“The governor lamented that ‘more care was given to political gain than the harm caused to a man and his family,’” Renaud wrote. “Every word Gov. Parson wrote applies equally to the way he treated me.”
That is a brutal assessment of a governor who did a journalist wrong for no reason other than he could. And that Renaud could put those words out into the open, finally, after months of hell caused by the leader who is supposed to represent people like him, must feel strange.
As I wrote in Tedium who this story first broke, Renaud and I have never met but share a lot of interests, including backgrounds in newspaper design and enthusiasm for retro computing. I could see myself in his shoes.
I feel bad that he even found himself in this position in the first place. His statement shows, though, that he learned some important lessons from this challenging incident. Hopefully, the political figure that put him in this spot also has.
Time limit given ⏲: 30 minutes
Time left on clock ⏲: alarm goes off
