The press and you.

YOU'VE JUST TAKEN THE OATH. You've moved into your plush new Capitol office. You're excited about reshaping your state and making good on that long list of campaign promises. Just when you're about to relax and contemplate your accomplishments, THE ONE RINGS. "IT'S REPORTER," your secretary moans, as if announcing the building is on fire. "He wants to ask you about . . ." YOU PANIC. "Do I still have to deal with these guys after I get elected?" you ask yourself, instructing your secretary to take a message before you even know why the reporter called. WRONG!

Dealing with the media doesn't to be a pain. Take it from a reporter who spent five years covering the Michigan Legislature. There are a number of simple things you as a state lawmaker can do to make life easier for yourself. My goal here is to show you how to win over the media and as a result communicate better with you constituents.

First, disabuse yourself of the notion that it's somehow the job of newspaper and TV reporters to make you look good. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are not cheerleaders.

I'll never forget how shocked I was as a young wire service reporter when lawmakers would stop by with press releases and ask: "Is this where I drop this off to put it on the wire?" or even more boldly demand: "I'd like a story on this!" It was as if these folks thought they were ordering a pizza, and we were just a drive-through outlet. Kind of like saying, "Yeah, I'd like a 12-inch story to go, please, with a triple-deck 64-point headline and a photo on the side." A puzzled member of the former governor's staff once asked: "I don't understand why you don't run our press releases?"

The media has absolutely no responsibility to run your press releases and dislikes being treated as a branch office of Western Union. Whether you like it or not, we decide what's news, not you. As Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry said: "Get over it."

A far better approach is to formulate a strategy to convince us that what you care about is something we should care about.

In our role as watchdogs, we are in essence the eyes and ears of the thousands of readers who subscribe to our papers because they don't have the time or money to come to the Capitol and watch you themselves. This role, contemplated by the Framers of our nation more than 200 years ago, means that it's far more important that we devote what little space we have to exposing your mistakes than praising your successes.

Why? It's the same reason incumbents have a huge advantage. Most constituents rightly assume if they don't hear or read much about you, you're doing your job. It's the same reason we don't send a reporter to the airport to cover safe plane landings. While there certainly is a growing need for balance and positive stories about state government, these stories have less chance of getting printed as the news hole for "serious journalism" shrinks.

So what can you do to improve your coverage in the media?

Some things are obvious: Respect deadlines, don't hide from tough questions, return phone calls, don't pester reporters to cover trivial and self-serving stories. Get to know reporters by name, take an interest in them as people and diplomatically point out errors in stories so they will be careful when quoting you. But my best advice is simple: Be a great source.

It may sound unseemly at first, but if you know about improper activities by other lawmakers, tell a reporter. You will benefit in two ways: You will clean up your institution and earn a reputation as being more interested in "good government" than "getting along with your colleagues." Nothing impresses a reporter more than a lawmaker who is willing to risk his own friendships with his peers to do what is right.

Not exposing unethical behavior also carries a far greater risk: The problem you keep silent about today may multiply tenfold tomorrow. Just ask former Michigan Representative Richard Young. An upstanding and ethical member of the Michigan Legislature, he first heard rumors in the fall of 1990 about all sorts of misconduct at the now infamous Michigan House Fiscal Agency. Rather than running to a reporter, his first instinct was to alert the committee chair overseeing the agency in hopes the matter would be cleaned up and dealt with internally. Needless to say it wasn't, and by the time I uncovered the scandal more than two years later, it had grown exponentially. The result: 10 legislative employees were fired, eight were convicted of felonies, nearly $1.8 million was misspent and the Legislature lost public respect.

Passing along tips about "ethically challenged" behavior by your adversaries may sound distasteful, but I strongly believe it is the best way to improve the system. There are other advantages. If you are a good source and are shedding light on improper behavior, reporters will trust you. They will also be too busy following up your tips to bother looking in your closet (assuming they need to), and some may shy away from writing negative stories about their best sources.

The former Democratic speaker of the Michigan House would ask me constantly: "Why do you keep picking on me?" And I would tell him, "Because the Republicans do a better job of telling on you guys than you do about them." I would beg him, "Give me something on them." Regrettably, he and the Democrats never learned to play the game. The uncontradicted wave of accurate, but negative, stories exposing impropriety by Democratic leaders may have ultimately been what cost him his seat and ended his party's 26-year control over the House in 1992. The bottom line is this: When you cooperate with reporters and make their jobs easier, you'll have more credibility when it comes time to sell a reporter on a story.

For those of you who want to learn from the mistakes of others, I have assembled this Sunday School lesson. While these Ten Commandments are entirely man-made, they may shed some light on how reporters think and how you can avoid becoming their next prey.

I LIVE IN YOUR DISTRICT.

Here's a no-brainer. I include it as the first commandment to show you how relatively low most reporters' expectations are. How can you, for example, effectively represent Detroit, a city plagued by drive-by shootings and inadequate schools, when you live 80 miles away, and your kids go to one of the best school districts in the state? All I am asking is that you be a legally eligible candidate.

II NEVER LIE TO A REPORTER. III OBEY THE LAWS YOU WRITE.

These two go together and make for a funny story. A year after my partner Charlie Cain and I exposed four lawmakers who didn't live in their districts, I was doing a follow-up story. Having trouble nailing down where one Detroit candidate lived, I double-checked her address with Michigan's vehicle records. That's when I discovered she had not had a valid driver's license for 18 months! It was revoked because she had at least six unpaid parking tickets in Detroit.

I did not call her up and ask her how she was campaigning without a driver's license. That would have been too easy. Instead, I asked her if she had a driver. The question was perfect because it followed a controversy years earlier in Michigan over the use by Detroit school board members of private chauffeurs. She emphatically denied having a driver and proudly announced that she drove herself to all her campaign functions. "How could you drive yourself if you haven't had a valid license for 18 months?" I asked. The trap closed, she reversed course and said her daughter drove her everywhere. My story never called her a liar. It didn't have to. Instead, it just described the chronology of our conversation. She was not elected.

IV DON'T MISS MANY VOTES, ESPECIALLY IF IT'S TO GO FISHING.

I was covering a key vote in the House and, for the first time in years, Republicans had lured enough Democrats to their side to have a shot at passing a pro-business tax bill. It looked like a rather interesting story was about to unfold when the GOP fell one vote short. Checking the tote board to see if any Republicans were missing, I noticed one was absent and had cost his party a rare legislative victory. His colleagues were so irked they told on him. He was up north fishing.

Weeks later, another lawmaker who had been the brunt of some negative stories I had written called me into his office and pointed out that he had never missed a vote and that it was unfair he hadn't gotten any public praise for his perfect attendance. I agreed and decided to write a feature on the "10 best, 10 worst" attendance records. (See how easy it is to con reporters into writing positive stories if you give them good ideas.) Which leads me to...

V DON'T HAVE CANDID CONVERSATIONS IN PUBLIC RESTROOMS WITH YOUR COLLEAGUES ABOUT HOW VACATIONS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN VOTING.

I was sitting in stall No. 1 in the men's room behind the House chamber, minding my own business, when the subject of the "Gone Fishing" story walked in with another colleague. This veteran lawmaker said he thought the angler got a raw deal from my "missed-vote" story. It wasn't fair because a lot of votes don't count and besides, he announced, he was going to miss two months of voting to take his family motorhome to Texas.

"Yeah," the fisherman said, "in the scheme of the universe, it's insignificant." The veteran lawmaker replied: "Hey, after 20 years in this business you get your priorities straight."

By this time, I had fetched my notepad and chronicled this amazing display of electoral arrogance. I couldn't believe my ears. The only question was: Should I write what I heard? Some second-guessed my decision, but I think once you understand my reasons for running the story, you will get a better picture of how reporters view their role covering government. First, this was clearly not an "off the record" conversation, as reporters define it. Let me explain. In a reporter's mind, a conversation is only "off the record" when you ask that it be "off the record," and the reporter agrees. Everything else a reporter sees or hears is "on the record"! To borrow computer terminology, the default setting with reporters is "on the record."

Some of you may also labor under the misconception that because neither man was talking to me, I somehow had an obligation not to publish their comments. Remember, we don't work for you. We work for our editors. More important, we work for the people who read our newspapers--your constituents. When I go to a committee room or attend a House session, I am doing it for the 400,000 people who read The Detroit News. I am there because my readers can't be them themselves.

I finally decided my readers would want to know exactly what was going on in Lansing. Reporters are not paid to write stories for their sources -- a rule far too many ignore. Nothing is worse for a democratic society than reporters who save their best stories for cocktail parties.

VI DON'T TAKE VACATIONS WITH LOBBYISTS.

Lobbyists may become your best friends, but try not to spend every waking minute with one. And spending your spring break with lobbyists after you've been around them all year, instead of getting away with your family, sure doesn't look good. That's especially true if you're staying at a building the lobbyist owns or rents. The Boston Globe and 20/20 are among the news organizations that have done this story. The story is fun for reporters and difficult for lawmakers to explain on the campaign trail. No laws were broken, but if you truly are going to represent your constituents, wouldn't you rather vacation with them instead of the lobbyists who are paid to be your friends.

VII WATCH HOW YOUR EMPLOYEES SPEND THE TAXPAYERS' MONEY. VIII DON'T PUT FRIENDS AND RELATIVES ON THE PAYROLL. XI AUDIT THE BOOKS MORE OFTEN THAN ONCE EVERY 14 YEARS.

Although there isn't time here to tell the story of the House Fiscal Agency scandal, these three commandments sum up easy solutions that could have prevented this nasty embarrassment. The late Representative Dominic Jacobetti, Michigan's longest serving lawmaker, insisted he didn't know anything about the theft of $2 million by the man he chose to head the agency. Of course, as former chair of the House Appropriations Committee and head of the three-member governing board that oversaw the agency, Jacobetti never held any of the required oversight meetings or did much of anything to oversee the agency, which paid his grandson $14,000 for a no-show job. It cost Jacobetti his powerful committee post and helped me and fellow News reporter Eric Freedman win a Pulitzer Prize. Which brings me to my final plea...

X MAKE YOUR RECORDS OPEN AND AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC. DON'T EXEMPT YOURSELF FROM YOUR STATE'S FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA).

Amazingly, Michigan lawmakers did just that when they passed the state's FOIA in 1976. Luckily, a provision in the Michigan' Constitution required that all "financial records, accountings, audit reports and other reports of public money" are to be "public records and open to public inspection" or Michigan taxpayers might never have learned about the abuses at HFA.

The easy way to avoid scandals is to make it clear to all lawmakers and legislative staffers that everything they do will be out in the open and subject to media scrutiny.

A reporter friend of mine summed up the problem best when, filled with frustration, he recently asked: "Why is it so difficult for lawmakers to understand that when you're elected you're no longer in the private sector, and everything you do must survive public scrutiny?" I had no answer for him. But his question underscores my final message on how the media views its role and your role in our democratic society: As an elected public official, you are no longer working for a private company nor for yourself. The rules change. You are working for the people of your district and your state. Your constituents have, in essence, hired me and other reporters who produce the news they consume to be your boss and make sure you do your job. If you are uncomfortable with this arrangement, move to a country without a free press or let someone else who can accept these ground rules take your place.

Jim Mitzelfeld shared the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting with Eric Freedman for their role in uncovering a scandal in the Michigan House Fiscal Agency for The Detroit News. After nine years as an investigative reporter, including five years covering the Michigan Legislature for The New and The Associated Press, he retired from journalism in August 1993 to study law at the University of Michigan. Mitzelfeld hopes to become a prosecutor or run for the State House himself someday.