This Trumpish attack on the media is ridiculous, yes, but serious nonetheless

[Nevilledog]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/09/mike-parson-trumpish-attack-on-media-is-ridiculous/

No paywall
https://archive.fo/Scm4K

Last fall, Josh Renaud, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (where I once worked), was aggregating Missouri state data on teachers to identify who was unlicensed. As he worked, he looked at the HTML code for the publicly available webpages — a task customarily accomplished with a couple of clicks to reveal the HyperText Markup Language used to construct the pages. Renaud noticed that the code included nine-digit numbers. He surmised, correctly, that these were Social Security numbers.

Rather than rushing to publish a scoop about the glaring privacy vulnerability for more than 100,000 Missouri public-school teachers, Renaud and the Post-Dispatch did the right thing. They alerted state education officials, giving them time to fix the problem before the paper disclosed it.

Initially, Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven was going to thank Renaud (“We are grateful to the member of the media who brought this to the state’s attention,” read a proposed statement, according to a document the Post-Dispatch later obtained through a Sunshine Law request). But the state’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, intervened.

At an Oct. 14 news conference, with the head of the Missouri State Highway Patrol standing by, Parson accused Renaud and the Post-Dispatch of “hacking” a state website and announced a criminal investigation.

*snip*