August 8, 2004

A Tiger By The Tale

There's a new organization in Tennessee called the Tennessee Institute for Government Ethics and Reform, or TIGER. It claims to be a non-partisan organization interested only in raising awareness among Tennesseans of the lax ethical standards governing the state legislators and lobbyists, in hopes of generating support for reform. The Tennessean newspaper recently reported on TIGER for not revealing all about its financing, and questioned whether the organization was a front group for right-wing politicos. Some on the right in Tennessee considered it an attack on the organization. I didn't blog about it because I saw the story as simply good journalism - an organization that claims to be about the ethics of ties between legislators, lobbyists and special-interest money must expect questions about its own ties to money and political interests. A well-run organization will be prepared to answer such questions - either have a sensible statement of why information about finances won't be disclosed or disclose the information and be ready to answer any questions about the sources of funding. TIGER wasn't ready, and that contributed to the organization looking bad in the initial news reports.

Today, The Tennessean wrote a long and, I thought, balanced story about some of the issued raised by the organization during a series of forums TIGER held around the state. Amazingly, the paper managed to write about the organization without mentioning it by name.