On March 4, we sent the following letter to Charleston Mayor William Cogswell:
“The city of Charleston and its public relations department routinely uses electronic mailing lists to disseminate news releases, flood advisories and other matters of public importance and safety. It has come to our attention that the city of Charleston is not sending news releases electronically to the Charleston City Paper.
“Furthermore, it has been suggested that the newspaper has been removed from the city’s electronic news release list. If this is true, why? And if it is true, please instruct your public relations team to restore the City Paper to its media outreach list.”
We asked Cogswell to get back to us within 10 days. Two weeks later, we had not heard about why we were suddenly removed from the news release email list. But we weren’t particularly surprised to get the silent treatment from the non-communicative, secrecy-laden Cogswell administration. So we pushed a little and got an epic response from Cogswell’s chief henchman, Logan McVey, that sent the newspaper’s editors into gaggles of giggles:
“To sign up for alerts, your team needs to go on the website and sign up for our Notify Me system. Your team can also find every release posted online as well, all readily available. As for further engagement, we have serious concerns with the editorial standards at the Charleston City Paper and do not believe it serves the best interests of Charleston residents to engage with an outlet consistently reporting inaccurate information and advocating against efforts to improve residents’ quality of life.”
So let us remind the super-charming McVey that without the sunshine of information provided by newspapers like the Charleston City Paper, taxpayers wouldn’t know about:
- Settlement. We unearthed a secret settlement made in November in a long-running construction defects lawsuit brought against developer Cogswell and his company by a residential-commercial homeowners’ association.
- Seal. We revealed the creation of a new brand mark to augment a historic city seal that the administration pushed through without informing city council members.
- Videos. We found a quiet contract from the city for Cogswell’s campaign communications team to make slick outreach videos. The contract came out in a City Paper Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
- Radio silence. The Cogswell communications team continues to not answer simple questions by phone or email about city business — just the sort of things they’re paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do every year.
Bottom line: By denying access to the City Paper to normal city communications, Backroom Billy Cogswell and his administration are playing silly games that can put citizens at risk during floods, storms and and other emergency situations (sometimes it takes awhile for news releases to hit the city’s website).
But in an era of Trumpy overreach, what’s happening here isn’t really surprising. The Cogswell administration should start doing its job with transparency and with the public in mind, regardless of whether it cares about the Charleston City Paper. Professionalism is needed over pettiness.
For the record (and as thousands of readers know): In the last five years, the City Paper has won dozens of awards for excellence in reporting and commentary. And we expect this to continue — even if it means digging harder to uncover anti-sunshine efforts by Charleston’s current government.
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