SPRING 2006 NEWSLETTER
GEORGIA FOI ACCESS
GEORGIA FIRST AMENDMENT FOUNDATION

‘Sunshine Week’ returns to pry open more government

By Tom Bennett

Lilburn, GA., March 6, 2006 -- In the big leagues, a player can bat .300 and be selected "Rookie of the year," only to sink the next year into a "sophomore slump." Is Debra Gertz Hernandez, skipper of U.S. Sunshine Week, worried about that?

"This is our second year, so don’t want to talk about it," said Hernandez by phone from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C.

"Actually we did talk about it several months back. We said, ‘Okay, we did so well the first year, how are we going to match it again?’ As we’ve gotten closer to this year’s dates, we see just the opposite happening. People are more excited about it. It seems there are more (media) planning coverage or advances. And we’ve got a lot more non-journalism. The League of Women Voters and American Library Association are doing programs. The League puts out a resource guide. We’re seeing a broader base of people being involved. The news that we’ve seen lately (about government non-disclosure) has heightened people’s awareness of it."

Sunshine Week has a strong Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) slant, but has being the boss of this annual emphasis helped Hernandez to know more about state sunshine laws, too?

"Yes, one thing that really surprised me at the conclusion of last year when we’d seen all the coverage was how bad it is in some states and communities," Hernandez said. "When you see it all, one big mass, it really hits you just how widespread this problem is."

Florida has more than 700 exemptions to open records, so Georgia’s 155 appear modest in comparison. Let’s give the rest of the nation the benefit of doubt and assume that Georgia’s number of these statutes for secrecy is average. That means there are about 7,750 state laws blocking access to government records for citizens and the media.

Let's take it a step further. Georgia has about 1000 governments – cities, counties, school districts, water and sewer authorities and development authorities. If this number is an average per state, then there are about 50,000 governments to teach that "sunshine laws" have fought their way into state codes. Important to know, too, for persons willing to travel and teach about sunshine law is that these governments are spread across 3,718,711 square miles, for that is the size of the U.S. according to Wikipedia.

Working on FOI at the state and local levels is a passport to career obscurity. However, we can at least try to make points like these to show the leaders inside the beltway, and at the big special-projects desks on dailies, that to only think about FOIA all the time is a mistake.

"I’m a contract employee," Hernandez said. "I work for the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, on a grant from the Knight Foundation." And she has office space at the Reporter’s Committee.

Andy Alexander, bureau chief for Cox Newspapers in Washington D.C., is this year’s FOI committee chair for ASNE; Cox owns WSB Radio and Television and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Pete Weitzel, who retired as managing editor of the Miami Herald in 1995, is freedom of information coordinator for CJOG in Washington. Hodding Carter III, former State Department spokesman, is honorary chairman for Sunshine Week 2006. That’s important for the South, too, because Carter III is a product of the distinguished journalism family that owned the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss. He is now a professor of leadership and public policy at the University of North Carolina.

The PBS weekly newsmagazine NOW will air a one-hour special March 17. about government secrecy as part of Sunshine Week.

There will be a national teleforum on March 13. It will ask, "Are We Safer in the Dark?" The discussion at the National Press Club in Washington will be moderated by Geneva Overholser of the Missouri School of Journalism's Washington bureau. It will be "fed via satellite to host locations across the country," according to a press release.

Almost lost in all of this is the fact that James Madison, the distinguished Southerner who was the father of the First Amendment and later became the 40th U.S. president, was born on March 16, 1751. The timing of Sunshine Week is built around that.

Sunshine Week is a revival of the AP "Right to Know Week" event of a generation ago. That annual emphasis was done best in Georgia by the Gainesville Times when it was edited by Johnny Vardeman. For a week, each government story in the Times had a box in it telling how the reporter got the information.

Tom Bennett of Lilburn is a GFAF volunteer and retired news employee of the Journal-Constitution.