Attn: Editorial writers
A report released yesterday (April 14) by the Government Accountability Office provides little or no comfort to journalists who believe their FOIA requests to the federal government are swept into a “black hole” from which they will never again see the light of day. The report discloses that there were a total of 21.3 million FOIA requests logged by 20 major government agencies during fiscal year 2006.
Clearly, it is not Sam Archibald’s Freedom of Information Act.
Archibald, who died in 2006 at age 84, abandoned his political reporting beat at the Sacramento Bee in 1953 to work as an aide to Rep. John Moss (D-Calif.). Archibald helped write the Freedom of Information Act, and worked alongside Moss for the next dozen years before it was signed into law in 1966. The law’s singular purpose was to help journalists pry loose information from government officials whose only reason for denying access, in too many cases, was simply that they could. Archibald left Washington in 1975 to teach journalism at the University of Colorado.
There’s no way to determine how many of the FOIA requests that were tabulated for the GAO report came from journalists. Not many, though. In fact, the word journalist doesn’t appear a single time in the 82-page report. Nor did keyword searches find any occurences for reporter and news.
FOIA has been transformed from a journalist’s information-gathering tool into a general purpose inquiry system for ordinary citizens. Not that that’s a bad thing, but 18.6 million requests that came in fiscal 2006 from Baby Boomers for their Social Security earnings records ought not be counted as FOIA requests.
GAO’s report was intended to assess how well the federal government responds to FOIA requests. But what’s the point if millions of FOIA requests that have nothing to do with “freedom of information” purposes are counted? If anything, the report draws into sharp focus how the FOIA has been reduced to little more than a statistic, misused by the government to prove how responsive it is to FOIA requests when genuine FOIA requests are being cast for burial in a sea of statistics.
News tips:
National Center for Health Statistics
Pregnancy rate drops for U.S. women under age 25 * Full report (26 pages)
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American Association of University Professors
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Newspaper Association of America
Newspaper websites attracted record-high 66.4 million visitors in 1st quarter
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