North Carolina journalists are still puzzling over Gov. Mike Easley's comment that the media should be "nice" to him.

It would be -- well, nice -- to know what he meant. But he hasn't elaborated, leaving anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the proper relationship between press and government to conclude that Easley himself lacks just such an understanding.

When media matters came up in a taped interview with The News & Record of Greensboro, the outgoing governor first attacked the recent series on dismal probation failures published by The News & Observer of Raleigh as a "hatchet job," which it wasn't. It was, instead, a well-balanced and painstakingly documented examination of alarming bureaucratic laxity and negligence that may have led to numerous avoidable murders committed by poorly supervised or totally unsupervised criminals.

Next, the governor, a former state attorney general, delivered himself of this distasteful and disturbing comment about the murder of Eve Carson in Chapel Hill: "Some young lady gets brutally murdered by a couple of probationers ... it's now the probation officers' fault. When are we going to start holding some of these people accountable and get some of these executions going again?"

Fairness Counts More

Then, in regard to his relationship with the press, Easley said:

"I try to keep my side of the window clean. My job is to be nice to other people, and their job is to be nice to me. Just 'cause they're not doing theirs doesn't mean I shouldn't do mine."

It's hard to remember too many instances in which Easley has gone out of his way to be "nice" to the North Carolina press. Indeed, a governor, like any other public servant in a democratic system, is under no obligation to do so.

But the people do have a right to expect that he will be fair -- that he will make sure the various departments under him are doing a good job and spending public money in proper fashion and obeying the laws and making public that which by law is supposed to be public.

When blatant examples arise in which those obligations appear not to have been well discharged, then it is the right -- the duty -- of the media to point out those shortcomings.

Time for a Change

Rather than acknowledge that there have been lamentable, fatal flaws in the probation process and setting out to do something about them in his final weeks, the governor has dug in his heels and complained about "gotcha journalism."

Earlier, when reporters found that state employees were deleting official and possibly incriminating e-mail messages in the midst of an N&O investigation of mental health reform, in obvious violation of the public records law, the governor should have put an end to the process and told state officials to err on the side of making the people's business public. Instead, he rather lamely offered the excuse that preserving all e-mail would be too costly. Yeah, right.

Overlooking such problems and instead looking for good and flowery things to say might be described as being "nice" to the governor's administration. But it certainly wouldn't be nice to readers, viewers and others consumers of news and opinion. And they, not officialdom, are the ones the media exist to serve.

Here's hoping Beverly Perdue, who takes over as governor tomorrow, has a more realistic understanding of that than her sometimes oversensitive and too often ineffective predecessor.