Journalists Want Transparency, But Not Right Away

It didn't take long for journalists to criticize the flaw -- for them -- in the federal government's new pilot program on making public all responses to Freedom of Information Act requests. It didn't take much longer for open government advocates to suggest the reporters were putting their interests ahead of the public's. "Get this," tweeted Erik Wemple, media critic at The Washington Post,"Federal government is implementing a FOIA reform that could actually hurt journos." Former journalist Lisette Garcia, an open government activist who now runs the FOIA Resource Center in Washington (DC), wasn't impressed with the argument against the pilot program. "Any media outlet seeking delays to protect scoops shows it cares more about profits than about the communities they purport to inform," she said. "On the basis of this position alone, any media outlet lobbying for an embargo carveout should be denied FOIA fee waivers going forward since the basis for the waiver is their promise to disseminate widely and rapidly," Garcia said. "What could be faster than right now?"

The bottom line is that under the FOIA statute, journalists don't have to be treated differently. "The 'equal access to all' policy is most welcome by the FOIA Resource Center," Garcia said. "Any editor who disagrees is apparently unfamiliar with judicial precedent establishing that, in America, there is no proprietary interest in facts and sweat of the brow will only take you so far. If you want to be best, from now on, you'll need to be first and correct, not just the most clever." In 2016, when the pilot program comes to an end, the Justice Department and the federal FOIA ombudsman at the Office of Government Information Services will have to decide where the public interest lies. "Make it public, I say," tweeted Charles Ornstein, an investigative journalist at ProPublica. "Open government is open government."