And why are they writing press releases for Lyn Schollett?
On March 3rd, a committee of the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted 9 to 7, along strict party lines, to advance Amendment 0946h to House Bill 1675. Before that final vote, it’s worth noting what happened on the amendment itself: it passed 16 to 0. Unanimous. Every Republican and every Democrat on the committee voted yes. That fact did not appear in the NH Journal’s coverage.
A draft PDF transcript of that committee meeting is available here, and you can watch it here.
The amendment does something straightforward and, in any other context, uncontroversial: it says that private organizations administering state-funded domestic violence programs must comply with New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law – the same transparency requirements that apply to every town board, school district, and public commission in the state. Public money. Public accountability. The amendment doesn’t touch victim privacy. It doesn’t name any organization. It simply says: if you spend the taxpayers’ money, the taxpayers get to see how you spent it.
On the floor of the committee, Chair Layon made an observation that went unreported. New Hampshire Hospital – a state agency that handles some of the most sensitive personal information in government, including the records of psychiatric patients – is subject to 91-A. Patient privacy is protected through the exemptions that are already built into the law. If that institution can operate transparently within the 91-A framework, the argument that a domestic violence grant coordinator uniquely cannot is very difficult to sustain. The framework already handles it. It has always handled it.
Rep. Diane Kelley, a Republican member of the committee, put the core principle simply during the floor debate: “98% funding. Public funding. If I pay tax dollars for this, I’d like sunlight.” That line also did not appear in NH Journal’s coverage.
Four New Hampshire Supreme Court cases, spanning fifty years, point toward exactly this result:
- Bradbury v. Shaw, 116 N.H. 388 (1976)
- Union Leader Corp. v. N.H. Housing Finance Authority, 142 N.H. 540 (1997)
- Professional Firefighters of N.H. v. Local Government Center, 159 N.H. 699 (2010)
- Ortolano v. City of Nashua, 343 A.3d 136 (2025)
The legislature wasn’t doing anything adventurous. It was, in the careful language lawyers use, codifying what the courts had already indicated the law requires. This is not a complicated idea. It is, in fact, the kind of idea that built the American tradition of open government – the instinct that public funds are not private property, that accountability is not harassment, that transparency is the price of the public’s trust.
You would not know any of this from reading NH Journal’s coverage of the bill on the day it passed committee.
What you would know is a great deal about a woman named Claire Best – a Hollywood producer from California who has spent several years raising pointed, sometimes sprawling questions about the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, the organization that administers the very grants HB 1675 would subject to transparency requirements. Her methods might be seen as aggressive. Her social media presence has been prolific. Perhaps some of her arguments might not be germane to the bill in question.
And yet.
We live in a moment when the names Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell – once dismissed as fodder for conspiracy theorists – have become the subjects of ongoing federal proceedings, released documents, and a national reckoning with how thoroughly certain institutions failed to ask obvious questions for a very long time. The lesson of that episode, if we are paying attention, is not that every accusation is true. It is that the instinct to protect an institution by discrediting its critics has a poor track record.
Did NH Journal do an exhaustive investigative journalism investigation into Claire Best’s claims? Or did it simply listen to whatever Lyn Schollett and the NHCADSV had to say about her?
The point is simply to say that NH Journal’s piece is almost entirely about Claire Best – her history, her methods, her associations, her failures in various complaint processes – and almost entirely not about the legislation that passed committee the same day. A reader finishing that piece knows a great deal about one California woman’s long campaign. She knows nothing about a unanimous 16-0 vote on the underlying amendment. She knows nothing about four New Hampshire Supreme Court cases, or what “public body established in 2000” means, or why the amendment’s authors believe it is constitutionally bulletproof. She does not hear Rep. Kelley’s 98% line. She does not hear Chair Layon’s point about New Hampshire Hospital.
Whatever one thinks of Claire Best, she did not write Amendment 0946h. Legislators did. Lawyers did. The New Hampshire Supreme Court, across fifty years of precedent, did.
That story went untold.
This is what professionals call a source problem. When a piece draws entirely from one side of a dispute – in this case, the leadership of the very organization the bill would subject to greater scrutiny – the result is not reporting. It is, at best, a very well-sourced press release. The piece contains no quote from a Republican legislator. It engages none of the amendment’s legal reasoning. It offers no account of why the bill’s authors believe public accountability and victim privacy are not merely compatible but explicitly reconciled within the amendment’s own text.
Instead, the story NH Journal told its readers was this: a bill targeting a domestic violence organization originated with a California woman who posts prolifically on social media and whose complaints have been dismissed by various agencies. Draw your own conclusions.
Perhaps the reporter simply didn’t read the amendment. Perhaps its passage and the backstory surrounding Best landed in the same news cycle, and the former got lost in the noise of the latter. These things happen in regional journalism, where resources are thin, and deadlines are real.
But the effect is what it is. NH Journal’s readers – many of whom instinctively understand that public money should come with public accountability – were handed a story that made their own side’s most defensible argument invisible, while making the opposition’s emotional case with considerable vividness. Whether the Coalition deserves scrutiny or not, its opponents in the legislature made a serious, grounded, constitutional argument, backed by a unanimous amendment vote. That argument was never reported.
There is a word for this in military contexts. It is friendly fire.
New Hampshire is a state that takes its transparency traditions seriously. Its Right-to-Know Law is not a technicality. It is an expression of the state’s foundational suspicion of concentrated, unexamined power – a suspicion that cuts across party lines and precedes the current polarization by generations. The instinct behind it is not partisan. It is the same instinct that built town meeting democracy, that gave New Hampshire its motto, that makes the state’s voters famously resistant to being told what to think.
The amendment that passed committee yesterday stands squarely in that tradition. It deserved a story that said so.
Authors’ and Speakers’ opinions are their own and may not represent those of Grok Media, LLC, GraniteGrok.com, its sponsors, readers, authors, or advertisers.
Disagree, agree, Got Something to Say, We Want to Hear It. Comment or submit Op-Eds to steve@granitegrok.com
Editor’s Note: If you’d like to read her work, Claire Best is a long-time contributor, with over 70 published articles on GraniteGrok.com.
