By: Mark Fitzgerald Newspapers, happily, are making a big deal of this second national Sunshine Week, mixing stinging editorials about Bush White House secrecy with investigative projects that sometimes confirm -- and occasionally challenge -- conventional wisdom about the state of open government these days.
One of the most shocking reports out of Sunshine Week was also, in some ways, the most mundane: just another freedom of information (FOI) audit across a state. These audits, in which reporters simply show up unidentified at school districts, sheriff's offices or town councils and request information that is clearly public, typically show depressingly low rates of compliance by governmental units.
What was different this Sunday wasn't so much the reports of bureaucrats reluctant to give up information as it was the state audited: Florida -- the original Sunshine State in all senses of the word.
Florida has by far the best open government laws in the nation. Yet, an audit by newspapers around the state found that 42 percent of the 220 agencies surveyed did not comply with the state's public records law. More than half, 51%, of school districts refused to release public information, the audit found.
"We wanted to see that things had gotten better," Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation, said in a Bradenton (Fla.) Herald article by staff writer Sylvia Lim. "The compliance was the same as it was." The First Amendment Foundation sponsored the audit as a follow-up to one two years ago.
Many papers blamed the combination of post-9/11 terrorist fears and what a Detroit Free Press editorial called a Bush administration "predisposed to secrecy" for the wave of proposals to cut back FOI laws. "This is the same administration that cites national security in assuming authority to monitor international telephone and Internet traffic; it's a know-more, tell-less approach," the Free Press said.
An Associated Press survey released Sunday found that since Sept. 11, 2001, state legislatures have enacted more than 1,000 laws on FOI issues. Of those, 616 restrict access in some way, while 123 were described as having a mixed or neutral impact on open government.
In the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Editor Doug Clifton noted that a recent survey showed that Americans are largely ignorant of the rights under the Constitution. He cited a McCormick Tribune Foundation survey, for instance, that showed that more than one in five Americans could name all five members of the cartoon "Simpsons" family, while just 0.1% could name all five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
"If the First Amendment itself is under assault by ignorance and indifference, your right to know is being hacked away by a government apparatus betting you'll stay that way," Clifton wrote.
Among the most ambitious Sunshine Week projects published Sunday was The Seattle Times' investigation into what it said were "hundreds" of civil suits improperly sealed by its hometown King County Court.
"Since 1990, at least 420 civil cases have been sealed in their entirety in King County Superior Court, The Times has found. Nearly all were sealed improperly," the newspaper reported.
The project -- "Your Courts, Their Secrets" by investigative reporters Ken Armstrong and Justin Mayo -- analyzed all the cases that had been sealed in recent years, and found one judge who has sealed at least a dozen cases in the past 17 years with "little or no explanation" for her actions.
Among the cases sealed: one involving an alleged pedophile priest, another a state employee accused of molesting juveniles at a youth lockup, and a third that accused a drug-lab director of secretly videotaping women providing urinalysis samples.
The Seattle Times did more than report on the secrecy, however -- it went to court last week to unseal some 18 cases. Among the cases are medical malpractice lawsuits, suits against the state's Department of Social and Health Services -- and the lawsuit involving the alleged pedophile priest.
"Those motions are the first of many The Times expects to file," the Times wrote. "In general, the newspaper is arguing that cases should be opened because the judge or court commissioner used the wrong legal standard while sealing the file, failed to explain adequately the need for secrecy or didn't take into account the public's interest in open courts."
Some Sunshine Week newspaper reporting noted progress in their areas. A Plain Dealer report Sunday by Diane Suchetka, for example, said Ohio could follow Connecticut, Illinois, Virginia and several other states in establishing a public-access office.
The legislature, the paper reported, could vote this spring on a bill to create an office of "Public Access Counselor," an attorney appointed by the Ohio Supreme Court to investigate allegations of open records or meetings laws.
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