RALEIGH - Gov. Mike Easley said Wednesday that he has instructed his senior staff, his press office and other state public information officers to cooperate better with news media outlets to provide information to the public.

Easley disavowed his office's "pettiness" toward some reporters and faulted his press secretary, Renee Hoffman, for leading subordinates in various executive agencies to think that she was instructing them to delete official e-mail messages to and from the governor's office each day.

"It never should have happened," Easley said. "It just never should have happened."

Easley made his remarks during a two-hour meeting with the head of the N.C. Press Association and the top editors of The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer and Carolina Journal. They're considering suing the governor over possible violations of the state's Public Records Law.

The controversy arose last month when Debbie Crane, a fired spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Human Services, said that Easley's press officials had told subordinate employees to destroy e-mail messages to the Governor's Office as a way to evade the state's Public Records Law.

At first, the Governor's Office denied the charge, but the administration later produced notes from two other agency spokespeople that support Crane's assertion. Their records from a meeting with other public information officers last May, which Hoffman led, included notes to delete e-mail messages to and from the governor's office every day.

Messages were kept

"The bad news is, most of them thought they were being told to delete everything," Easley said. "The good news is, in spite of all that, they all kept their stuff like they were supposed to. They all followed the [correct] policy and said, 'I know this was the direction, but I'm not doing it.' "

Easley said Hoffman doesn't think that's what she said, has an impeccable record in 29 years of government service, and kept so many e-mail messages that she used more than her allotment of computer memory.

"So you sort of believe she's got to be telling the truth, because she keeps all of them," Easley said. "But you've got to believe the other ones can't all be confused."

Easley defended his administration's policy to let employees decide whether to delete official e-mails by judging whether the messages hold lasting "administrative value."

The Public Records Law, however, says that, with some exceptions, all government e-mail concerning public business is a public record, and must be retained and provided upon request.

Easley said he hopes a commission he appointed to examine the issue of e-mail retention will develop a clearer policy.

"People who work for the state are very honest, and they try to do the right thing," Easley said. "But they need to know what that is, and the guidelines need to be more specific. I don't think people are going to try to be dishonest with you."

'It's our fault'

Easley, a former district attorney and state attorney general, said he told his staff that the public records controversy had overshadowed his proposal to fix the state's beleaguered mental-health system.

"I told them: 'You know whose fault that is? It's our fault. We let this get to be an issue,' " he said.

Greater cooperation with the media would be good for the public and for the advancement of his policies, the governor said. He said the e-mail controversy is distracting his administration from its final year of work.

"This kind of thing is a distraction that ruins your focus, and shouldn't have happened to begin with," he said. "I shouldn't have let it happen."

John Drescher, The N&O's executive editor, told Easley that his press office has a poor reputation among journalists.

"It seems like your press office, your public information officers, view their job as to make our job as difficult as possible," Drescher said.

"We can't interview folks. Everything has to be controlled, everything has to be managed by your press office. It slows us down. I think it makes the quality of the information we get less good. Every kind of public records request we make is a fight."

Easley said he instructed his staff Tuesday to work more cooperatively with the news media.

"I do not have time for pettiness," he said, punctuating his words for emphasis.

Making it harder for reporters "for no reason other than they can is not something that I'm going to tolerate any more, and I've told them that. I think my people want to be more cooperative. The ones that don't, I've got other things they can do."