The New Bloodsport: Public Records as Entertainment
In theory, public records are the conscience of local government. They are how residents hold us to account, and how journalists test our claims. Shedding light to keep mold from blooming in the corners; bad business shrinks like a vampire in the sun. In practice, in 2025, they're also content. Clips. Feeds. A never-ending series where plot twists arrive by PDF—or Dropbox—a dopamine hit straight to the inbox.
Over time you learn to read the subject lines the way a blackjack dealer reads faces—what's routine ("housing violations for -x property"), what's earnest ("body-cam footage for a defense"), and what's theater ("all emails, texts, internal messages, and post-it notes from every employee, any topic, any date"). Ohio's Sunshine Laws are intentionally broad; any person can request a record, and that's a feature, not a bug. The law is broad. Motives? Not so much. Agendas are narrow, and good faith is optional.
The more our civic life moves onto platforms designed to reward outrage, the more some requesters approach records like a slot machine. Pull the lever, hope for a "gotcha," post the clip. Transparency gets weaponized for engagement, not insight. We see it when a request is framed to insinuate a scandal first and ask a question second; when "any and all" replaces a date range; when "please advise" is a thinly veiled "please incriminate."
If you want to understand how public records can morph into public spectacle, consider what happens after any high-profile neighborhood dust-up makes its way from a Ring camera to the group chats. Within hours, records requests pour in: the police report, any 911 calls, all emails mentioning the address, and—of course—body-camera footage. The requests come from reporters, activists, people in other cities, and people who live a few blocks away. That last group—the neighbors—changes the temperature to cook up perverted voyerism, and it's shameful.
Disputes over what counts as a "public" record—and who gets to decide—become proxy battles over power, trust, and optics. In real time, legal nuance is steamrolled into a shareable "truth," dulled for mass consumption.
And that is the part you don't see on the livestream: the human, boring, painstaking mechanics that come before anything is published. In Ohio, the standard isn't "immediately," it's "within a reasonable time," which means someone has to locate, review, and redact—line by line—anything exempt (minors' info, certain personnel data, security details) before release. Those are not delay tactics; they're the law, the same law that gives you the right to ask. But nuance is not a native language on the internet.
Meanwhile, the emotional labor is real. It's one thing to process a journalist's request about a budget or a contract; it's another to watch the names of people you've seen at the grocery store ask for every email you or your colleagues have written with someone they hate-follow on Facebook. That's when curiosity rots into a grotesque peep show. It's not about understanding how government works; it's about catching someone saying the wrong thing in the wrong tone so it can be clipped, captioned, and fed to an audience primed for digital lynchings. Records become episodes; the comment thread becomes the verdict.
There's also an incentive problem. File carefully scoped requests, get documents faster—but no spectacle. File sprawling, adversarial ones and narrate each beat online—"City stonewalls again!"—and you can grow a following even as you slow your own request and everyone else's. I've personally been name-checked in requests alleging I'm "embargoing" information—an absurd, insulting claim that misunderstands both the law and the process, but it plays well on the timeline.
I don't romanticize City Hall. Opacity happens, and records have rightly exposed it. But more and more it's a burlesque version of governance: staged cameras, chopped paper trails, policy by inbox. The civic route is persistence and process; the shortcut is provoke, post, and escalate.
Oversight gives way to pageant—contenders onstage, courtiers offstage, everyone playing to the camera. Suddenly it's court politics: a few angle for the throne while the rest warm up the crowd.
The fix isn't to close the blinds, it's to rebuild trust and lower the entertainment value of government. That means publishing more proactively—budgets in explorable formats, contract dashboards, release logs that show what's been posted without requiring a request. It means answering hard questions in public so the record isn't a gotcha, it's a given. It means reminding ourselves—inside and outside City Hall—that a record is not a story; it's a source. Stories require context.
And it means we, the people doing this work, remember the difference between the public and the crowd. The public asks because they genuinely care about the answer. The crowd asks because they care about the impact the answer has online. We owe the first our patience and our best efforts. We owe the second the same, and a little less of our peace.
