It is hard to write about Sunshine Week, an endeavor promoted primarily by the American Society of News Editors, without coming off as parochial and self-serving. Frothy testimonials to the glory of a free press also ring hollow to a great many Americans today for whom the "Mainstream Media" -- MSM for short -- are objects of distrust: pompous, partisan, blinkered, and often so irredeemably biased that they cannot even see their own shortcomings. We share some of those concerns.
And yet . . .
Even conceding all those points does not impair the validity of the endeavor, or reduce the necessity for a sustained and concentrated focus on the importance of open government. Newspapers and broadcast corporations might be the initial beneficiaries of access to public records, council meetings, internal government documents, and the like. But they are far from the only or even the principal beneficiaries.
Institutions and individuals also have been able to walk through the doors that media outlets such as this newspaper first opened. Interest groups from the ACLU to gun-rights advocates have used the Freedom of Information Act to learn about government endeavors previously hidden from view. The Virginia Public Access Project reports on the campaign contributions to state politicians, activity that frequently provides insight into why certain legislators vote the way they do. Private citizens can use FOIA to good effect, too -- as Lee Albright did a few years ago when his inquiries into practices at the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries exposed gross fiscal mismanagement.
In some ways, FOI laws resemble nuclear weapons: They don't have to be put to use to be effective. Government bodies often release material upon informal request because they know that if they do not, then a formal FOI request will follow -- and if the law is not observed, then the matter could be headed to court. They can comply easy, or they can comply hard. Most pick easy.
A few pick hard -- and then someone must go to court to pry things loose. At other times, government agencies will try to discourage requests by estimating that compliance will cost big bucks for man-hours, photocopying, and so on. Often, large media institutions are the only ones with the resources to pay the freight. Many stories, from the details of how administrators handled the massacre at Virginia Tech to the story of former Richmond Police Chief Rodney Monroe's dubious diploma from VCU, appear only because media outlets such as The Times-Dispatch commit the personnel, money, and time to go after them.
In the end, though, the principle upon which Sunshine Week rests -- open government -- goes beyond the particular purposes to which it has been put. Nothing less than democracy itself depends on openness. If the people do not know what their rulers are doing, then they have no basis on which to judge the performance. They can see only the puppets, never the strings.
It might be self-serving to champion open government, but it is not only self-serving. What's more, if newspapers and broadcast media did not do so, precious few would. Gradually -- perhaps not so gradually -- doors would close. And then it would be too late for anyone else to object.
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