People keep asking why reporters in New Jersey demand access to public records, when public records are only slightly less dull than newspaper stories based on public records. But now you, the American public, might finally understand the strange values of journalists. For there are three ways in which you have begun to remind me of every reporter I know.

1. You seem to be drinking more.

2. I'm getting really sick of loaning you money.

3. In your opinion, everyone in charge of anything in this country is a lying rat dirtbag.

This last belief is what people mysteriously fall into after enough rat dirtbags lie to them. Businesses in which you invested told you they had money when they didn't. Your employers tell you they have no money when they do. You suspect everyone. The next time you visit your parents, you plan to pull hard on your mother's nose and yell, "I recognize you through that ridiculous mask, Mr. Cheney!"

And this is how reporters have always been. Instead of being able to have fun in the normal way - in a naked, squishy bacchanal, as if they were sailors or cowboys or Liza Minnelli's husbands numbers 2 through 4 inclusive - reporters cut loose by sitting around and casting aspersions on other people's motives. "That Mother Teresa," we remark - while, in a much more interesting bar miles away, a pair of topless Siamese twins perform a forbidden trapeze act. "You think she was skimming money?"

We compete with each other to ask that kind of question until, eventually, we learn how to ask the stupidest questions of all. Suppose you're covering a memorial of a man who saved 12 orphans from an exploding group home. A woman with a weathered face and six children lays a yellow rose upon the grave. What the greatest reporter of all time would ask her right then is, "Hey, is that your real hair?" Because, if it isn't, no one else has that story!

We're like this because people lie to us. The president lies to us all the time. And we report what he says - not because we believe it, but because he said it, so we have to say that he said it. See? That's why we drink.

Which brings me back to New Jersey. Until recently, our state had the worst open records laws in the country. This meant that, whenever we got word of a newsworthy crime when I worked at a paper in North Jersey, the police would tell us we had to call back later for any details - so much later, it turns out, that it was just quicker to wait for the Lifetime cable channel to put out a made-for-TV movie about it, inevitably starring Veronica Hamel.

A story: Once when I was an editor, an editorial assistant who had made a routine round of phone calls to police stations told me a cop said someone had stolen a henway. This is an old joke. I'm supposed to ask, "What's a henway?" and you answer, "A hen weighs three or four pounds." But this particular editorial assistant didn't seem to have that sort of prank in him, and probably the cop was putting one over on both of us. Still, I phrased it very carefully when I asked, "Did the officer say what a henway was?"

The editorial assistant looked down at his notes, looked up at me again and said, "He said I'd have to call back."

Anyway.

We all pushed for a new public records law. And amazingly, the state Legislature passed one (after diligently exempting itself from a lot of it). But then, state agencies realized a funny thing. They were so unaccustomed to telling anyone anything that they actually had no protocol for doing it. Gov. James E. McGreevey had each department write up a set of exemptions for itself, then he put all those exemptions into effect until they could be debated. This explanation seems reasonable enough, in a vaguely incompetent sort of way. There is just one little problem:

Everyone is a lying rat dirtbag.

That's why we keep demanding access to documents that neither we nor even the people who wrote them really want to read. Somebody is hiding something. Even I'm hiding something. If you want to know what it is, you'll have to call back.