Sifting through a 12-and-a-half foot pile of documents is only one of the things that reporters at WTHR-TV had to do to shine light in the dark corner of Indiana’s business contractor. That pile personified the perseverance that two Indianapolis reporters talked about at Wednesday’s 9th annual Sunshine Week professional-in-residence.
John Russell, an investigative reporter from the Indianapolis Star, and Bob Segall, chief investigative reporter at WTHR-TV, shared their experiences with attendees on Wednesday.
Both Russell and Segall dug into cases where public tax dollars were mismanaged and were refused access to information that would eventually tell the truth about the companies’ practices. Practices that claimed thriving factories existed in places that, in reality, were just cornfields or abandoned buildings, as the reporters found in their investigations.
“The less they’re looked at, the less they know the law,” Russell said regarding the companies he investigated.
Russell had worked on investigations into companies such as LiTEBOX, an illegitimate energy company, and the role of Monica Liang in the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. He and his team had to request countless documents from their subjects via the Freedom of Information Act.
“Records are your friend,” Russell said. “Records won’t lie to you.”
Segall had a similar experience when he helped bring into question the IEDC’s lack of record access and transparency. The company hyped up a rumor that they had created jobs that Segall and his team soon found out had never materialized.
“They lured us in, like nobody’s business,” Segall said. “Happy news, everybody wanted to jump all over it.”
Once WTHR began following up on the supposed jobs that were created, they ran into some roadblocks.
“IEDC said ‘No, we aren’t going to let you in.’ And they didn’t provide any information,” Segall said. “There was sense of euphoria because, hey, this was a state agency that doesn’t like people poking around, and for an investigative reporter, that’s usually a pretty exciting thing when you stumble across it.”
Even with big executives and corporate giants denying access to records and information, the two journalists urged students to persevere if they get into that position.
“There are other agencies that try take a long time and try to drag their feet hoping you’ll go away,” Segall said. “You have to not go away.”
Students then learned that persevering can pay off. Sen. Mike Delph of Carmel soon introduced Senate Bill 162, which required the IEDC to provide job information to the public. The bill has not yet passed.
“It is still just as hard today as it was in December, as it was the year before and as the year before that, to get information out of this state,” Russell said.
The state has yet to come completely into the light and transparency is arbitrary to those in the Statehouse, Segall said.
“This new administration, we’re still waiting to see how open they are, but like the last administration, they might be putting up roadblocks to open access,” Segall said.
