Murphy, who covers breaking and general news for WAtoday, wrote that while much attention has been paid to the decline of local media, what readers often do not see is the fight WA journalists undertake on behalf of the public to get even basic information.
'Transparency has actually never been worse,' she said, based on her daily conversations with people in government organisations and private institutions.
One example involved a man attacked at a Perth shopping centre about a month ago. Murphy asked an authority about ongoing anti-social behaviour at the centre. In reply, she was told they would not facilitate an interview with anyone who could tell her what was going on, and the shopping centre 'wasn't really a problem'. A friend who worked at the authority later sent a photo of a dashboard showing the outsized number of offences at that centre.
Another case concerned the controversial WA university merger. In April, Murphy emailed the University of Western Australia asking to confirm the existence of an internal feasibility study into merging UWA with Curtin and Murdoch. Her deadline was ignored. After three days she checked back. The person who responded, someone who Murphy said was 'ostensibly a journalist about 20 years ago', replied: 'Yes.' When Murphy asked if the university intended to respond, the answer was: 'No.' Months later, the government announced it would proceed with a business case for a potential merger, and UWA supported the idea.
Murphy also noted that the Prisoner's Review Board has stopped publishing release details of paroled prisoners, that court transcripts cost $227 for about 20 pages, and that government departments often provide irrelevant statements rather than answering direct questions.
She wrote that over the last decade, generations of experience have left newsrooms, but many of those journalists have moved into highly paid PR jobs 'running interference for a government that once billed itself as the 'gold standard' of transparency'.