Representatives Hildebran and Cook tried hard to shift a call for greater government transparency onto transparency for private entities, including new media who hold them accountable.
Representative Giovanni Capriglione’s HB 524 calls on legislators to disclose government contracts held by their family.
While grilling Rep. Capriglione, Rep. Hildebran said that he’d like to see more transparency on consultants. This was after asking Capriglione’s who his consultant was.
This is ironic, considering Hildebran’s consultant, Murphy Turner and Associates, has recently disbanded in the midst of a lawsuit brought by Texans for Fiscal Responsibility for trademark infringement.
Later, a representative of the Texas Press Association heartily endorsed the bill. After he spoke, Rep. Cook asked him to ponder 501c4 government watchdog groups. This was the second attempt to change the subject from the government transparency bill to transparency of a private entity; this time a private entity that holds government accountable.
Soon after, Hildebran jumped back in to try to switch the focus onto more transparency for media – new media in particular. Even more specifically, “agenda-driven news”. Evidently agenda-driven news is something other than the ‘objective’ mainstream media, for whom an recent Rasmussen poll shows only 6% of voters see as very trustworthy.
After the media TPA representative defended the honor of his craft, the slick Hildebran got a swipe in at the mainstream media too, saying, “Fortunately you get a lot of smaller ones than you do big ones and that’s what keeps you all clean-living, baby. If it was just all the big guys you wouldn’t be too clean.”
–hearing video – TPA tesimony and committee discussion starts at 2:28:55 mark