Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Barstow, of the New York Times, will present "Freedom of Information: The Act, the Press and the Future" at the Science, Industry & Business Library this morning in honor of the 13th annual Freedom of Information Day.
Established by a Congressional Joint Resolution in 1989, Freedom of Information Day is held on or near March 16, the birthday of James Madison, fourth President of the United States and primary architect of the Bill of Rights.
Commemorating the pivotal role of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), David will discuss freedom of information and freedom of the press - particularly how accessing government information using the Freedom of Information Act affects the work of journalists.
We asked David a few questions about the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and its effect on the general public:
1) Why is the FOIA important?
FOIA is a potent yet badly underestimated guarantor of our democracy. Its singular blessing is that it gives each of us the legal standing to demand information about the workings of our government, no matter how embarrassing or damning or inconvenient. It gives all of us a tool to follow the money or examine the consequences of laws and policies. It's existence means that politicians and bureaucrats aren't the sole arbiters of what we know about their work. It helps level the playing field.
2) What major impact has FOIA had on Americans?
More than anything, FOIA helps set the terms of the relationship between the governed and those who govern. It puts flesh on the idea that government ought to be accountable to all of us. It says we have a right to know. We have a right to question. It constantly reaffirms a basic standard of transparency, and this standard has served the American people well. It has helped reporters, researchers, historians, bloggers, activists and ordinary citizens shine a light on countless examples of incompetence, waste and corruption. It says that we are governed, not ruled -- a distinction at the core of the American experiment.
3) How has FOIA affected the media and its reporting to the public?
Look at any ambitious example of investigative reporting in this country and you will almost certainly find the fruits of a reporter's skillful and dogged use of FOIA requests. But perhaps an even more important impact is the way FOIA helps neutralize the sins of "access reporting.'' Without access to public records, reporters are too often at the mercy of public officials for even basic information. And that means trying to stay in the good graces of those in power, which leads to the dreaded "access journalism'' -- essentially trading uncritical coverage for the privilege of a prompt call back. This is where we get the highly selective leaks of cherry-picked information to favored journalists, especially in the crucial realm of national security. For all its imperfections, FOIA gives us leverage to break this dependency. It offers us a way to circumvent stonewalling and media manipulation, which is why those in power are so often tempted to invent new ways to limit FOIA's reach.
4) How has FOIA had an impact on your work? Would you share an anecdote about a positive outcome due to FOIA?
Like most reporters, I have a love-hate relationship with FOIA. Too often canny bureaucrats try to hide behind FOIA. Instead of simply handing over documents that are obviously public, they will make you file a FOIA request, knowing this will buy them all kinds of time. They understand perfectly well that by the time they actually have to cough up records, the reporter will likely be long gone onto the next story. And yet the payoff can be enormous when reporters have the patience and fortitude to battle it out. A couple of years ago I wrote about a secretive Pentagon program to influence news coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program targeted retired officers who worked as "military analysts'' for major TV and radio networks. Those articles simply would not have been possible without the Freedom of Information Act. When the Pentagon refused to produce documents describing its dealings with these military analysts, the Times sued the Defense Department for violating FOIA. As a result, after a lengthy court battle, we gained access to more than 10,000 pages of documents that helped us describe the inner workings of this program. Once we did, the Pentagon quickly shut it down.
5) Tell us a bit about your event at the Library and why it's important for New Yorkers to celebrate FOI Day.
FOIA is like a muscle -- if you don't use it, it gets weak. I'm speaking at the New York Public Library today to both celebrate the Freedom of Information Act and encourage its broader use so that the muscle doesn't get weak. I can't tell you the difference it makes when you deal with government agencies that routinely get FOIA requests versus those that don't. As a general matter, the more government officials are conditioned to FOIA, the faster you get a response. And each time a requester wins a FOIA battle, it paves the way for everyone who follows.
Freedom of Information Day will be observed at the Science, Industry and Business Library of The New York Public Library located at 188 Madison Avenue on Wednesday, March 16, with a presentation and discussion from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in Conference Room 14/15 on the lower level of the library.
If there was ever an insidious oxymoron, it's "friendly fire." The practice of inadvertently killing your own soldiers goes way back, at least to the War of the Roses in 1461 when Lancastrian archers, firing into a snowy blizzard against the Yorkists, reportedly watched aghast as their arrows fell back in the wrong direction. But it took the U.S. military to come up with an innocuous-sounding phrase to try to whitewash the thing.I thought of this while watching The Tillman Story, the documentary about Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan. What upset his mother, Mary, was not just that he was killed by his fellow troops but that the Army concocted an elaborate cover story to make it seem he was a hero cut down by enemy fire.At the time, I was researching the death of my own father, Barney Darnton, a war correspondent for The New York Times, who died off the coast of New Guinea in October, 1942. He was killed when the troop ship he was on was bombed by an unidentified aircraft -- "Jap or our?" he scribbled in his notebook moments earlier -- that turned out to be an American B-25. General Douglas MacArthur was loath to release any details of the incident. In an otherwise stirring tribute to my father, he called the death "accidental" and let it go at that. As the mother of another American soldier killed in the attack wrote plaintively to my mother, desperate for details of what happened, "An accident can mean anything. Falling out of a tree is an accident."My mother quickly learned from private sources -- other war correspondents -- that it had been a case of friendly fire. She didn't press for many more details and she especially didn't care to know the identity of the pilot who did the bombing. "I only want him to be comforted and to realize that mistakes are as much a hazard of war as direct enemy action," she wrote back to the other mother, Mary Fahnestock.At the time it made sense to keep the story of the attack under wraps, at least for a few weeks, because the force my father was covering was massing on the north shore of New Guinea for a surprise attack on Buna, the first ground assault in MacArthur's island-hopping campaign to roll the Japanese back to Tokyo. No reporter would have been foolish enough to try to get that kind of sensitive information into print. But that rationale evaporated once the offensive was underway and still the story remained untold. MacArthur's heavy-handed censors were notorious for cutting out any bit of news that hinted that his organization was less than perfect. It would have been embarrassing to admit that the great campaign was kicked off with a self-inflicted wound.Curiously, the paper for which my father worked, the Times, slipped into the same mode of thinking. To my amazement, I discovered that even after the war was over, the Times (for which I went to work years later) suppressed the true story. In March, 1947, a reporter named Anthony Leviero filed a story with a lead saying that Barney Darnton "was killed in a pitched battle between American ground and Air Forces ... in perhaps the first of a number of tragic incidents during the war in which American aircraft mistakenly attacked our own troops."The Times killed the story. Why? Years later, in a private memo to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the managing editor, Edwin L. James, explained: "The story was not used on the ground it would not do any good." So for decades readers of the paper of record, had they had any reason to follow the case closely, would have known only that some sort of "accident" had occurred.Why are the authorities, military and otherwise, so cowardly when it comes to admitting that sometimes mortars land in the wrong places and sometimes helicopter gunships shoot the wrong hillside? Oddly enough, judging from my own limited experience, relatives of the deceased, like Mary Tillman and my mother, appear to understand that such tragedies can happen in "the fog of war." What upsets them is the unwillingness to own up to them. The military authorities undoubtedly say that if the truth were known, that would somehow render the deaths "meaningless." That's a canard. The deaths are meaningful -- nothing can make them otherwise. And when the truth is suppressed, the relatives tend to believe that the higher-ups are simply covering up some vast organizational snafu that will reflect badly on themselves.In my research, I found some other interesting things. There was, for example, no official record of the name of the pilot or the aircraft that bombed my father's ship. In the mission records of the day, the crews sometimes recorded incidents in which they had been fired upon by our own ground forces but almost never when it happened the other way around. But the Internet is an astounding instrument for vacuuming up information. Eventually, I was able, through a network of connections, to find out the name of the plane and the identity of the pilot; to read the unpublished journal of an Australian "spotter" who witnessed the attack from land; to interview a soldier who wrapped my father's body in a blanket to take it to shore, and even to talk to a 70-year-old Papuan who had seen the bombs fall as a six-year-old boy on the way to school. I tried telephoning the pilot; somewhat to my relief, he had passed away a few years earlier.I don't know what I would have said to him, but I certainly wouldn't have blamed him. Like others affected by these wartime deaths, I realize that intentionality is all -- if he did not mean for it to happen, and if he had behaved responsibly, he should not be held accountable. It's high time to let some daylight in upon the inescapable phenomenon of "friendly fire." And we could perhaps begin by changing its name.John Darnton's memoir, Almost a Family, has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.Ed Schultz called Ann Coulter "toxic" and said that she was spreading misinformation about the health effects of radiation.Coulter caused controversy by writing acolumn about the Japanese nuclear crisis, which said that radiation can actually be healthy. She brought up a number of scientific studies which she said concluded that "at some level--much higher than the minimums set by the U.S. government--radiation is good for you," and can even reduce the risk of cancer.Schultz heaped scorn on this theory on his Friday show. "A lot of people say Ann Coulter is toxic,' Schultz said. "But we had no idea that she would take that literally...you would laugh at her if she wasn't making light of a terrible tragedy."Schultz said that it was possible that low doses of radiation could be beneficial to peoples' health. But he cited several governmental and international research studies which, he claimed, concluded that the theory needs to be researched more before that conclusion can be definitively made.Coulter, Schultz continued, "only cares about being provocative so Fox will keep putting her on TV...you could write a scientific formula for her: Ann goes on TV. Ann goes off TV. There's always misinformation."The New York Times announced Thursday that it will begin charging readers for online access to its content, marking a dramatic shift in the relationship that a news outlet with the largest online readership in the country will have to the Web.In a letter to readers, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the paper, laid out the details of the impending paywall, which he said will go into effect immediately in Canada and on March 28 for the rest of the world. He called the move, which has been in the works for over a year, a "significant transition" and "an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform."Sulzberger said that readers will be allowed to access 20 articles a month for free. After that, they will have to subscribe to get access to further content, both for the paper's website and for its smartphone app. There are three pricing plans for people to choose from; at each pricing level, the level of access readers have to the paper's content increases. The cheapest costs $15 per month. The most costly plan costs $35 per month, and allows unlimited access to the Times' website, smartphone and tablet apps. People who subscribe to the print edition of the paper will also have unlimited access.These details largely conform to earlier reports on how the paywall would work. The Times had made it clear that it did not want to mimic the total paywalls put into effect by papers such as The Times of London and Newsday, which block access to all content unless the reader pays. (Those paywalls resulted in a huge drops in papers' online readership.) Most readers will likely not go past the 20-article-a-month limit.The paper also signaled that it wants to stay relevant in the social media world. According to Sulzberger's announcement, people who come to the Times site from Facebook, Twitter or from blogs will be able to read those articles even if they have gone over their monthly limit.However, Sulzberger said that a limit will be placed on "some search engines," meaning that after readers have accessed a certain number of articles from search engines, any future articles they access from there will be added to their monthly count.AllThingsD's Peter Kafka reported that the only search engine that will be affected this way is Google, where there will be a five-article limit. This marks a clear attempt by the Times to close what could be a giant loophole, since so much online traffic is directed through Google. But it also presents a risk for the paper for the same reason.The new paywall marks the second attempt by the Times to set up a new revenue stream for its online operations. In 2005, the paper erected a paywall around its opinion section called TimesSelect, but retreated in 2007 after a drop in readership and complaints from its op-ed columnists.
Watch (h/t Mediaite):
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