Let the sunshine in

In an article published in The New York Times Magazine last October, former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind reported the following interchange between himself and an important White House aide:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ ... The advisor said, ‘that’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’”

For any who endorse this picture of government, Sunshine Week, a week dedicated to the importance of open government and the free dissemination of information, probably seems as quaint and obsolete as the Geneva Conventions. But for those of us who believe that a well-informed electorate is the life-blood of democracy, this is a good time to review the status of the American public’s access to information.

The results of such a review are not reassuring. U.S. government secrecy has increased dramatically lately: since 2001, the number of federal classified documents has risen by 75 percent, according to the National Archives. Carol Haave, the official in charge of information security at the Pentagon, testified last year that only about 50 percent of the information classified by the government every year actually warrants that treatment.

Even congressmen are frequently cut out of the information loop, and some of them are starting to complain. Henry Waxman, for example, is requesting hearings to discover whether “the Bush Administration abused the classification process to improperly withhold the 9/11 Commission findings from Congress and the public until after the November elections.” On the other side of the aisle, Chris Shays has said that “current classification practices are highly subjective, inconsistent and susceptible to abuse.”

It could of course be argued that a greater degree of secrecy has been necessary following the events of 9/11, and up to a point this is no doubt true—but only up to a point. If we want to remain a free society, it’s not a very distant point.

One of the prices we must pay as members of a free society is to balance the interests of security with—and sometimes sacrifice them to—those of liberty. As Benjamin Franklin said, “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Just as troubling as the excessive secrecy is the fact that the character of the press as a conduit of facts has been increasingly compromised. In order to function as such a conduit, the press must of course be independent of the government. But we now find that much of the information being fed to us as “news” has in fact been no more than paid advertisements presented by government shills.

Possibly the most well-publicized case has been that of Armstrong Williams, a “ journalist” who received six figures in government money in remuneration for touting partisan policies, all the while pretending to be a free agent. This is not by any means an isolated instance. It has apparently become standard practice for government agencies to use taxpayer dollars to create phony “news” videos, plugging government policies, that are aired as bona fide news segments—without disclosure of their source—by many stations around the country. According to a March 13 story in The New York Times, literally hundreds of such videos have been produced by at least 20 different government agencies in the last few years.

With the government withholding documents containing real and important facts on the one hand and spoon-feeding us the opinions they want us to hold on the other, it’s easy to see why they might think that they can create reality for the American people.

Sunshine Week seems like a good time to ask ourselves whether we might prefer to create reality for ourselves, by exercising our votes in the light of the widest and most complete assortment of facts we can assemble. If that’s how you feel, you’re going to have to do some work to keep open your access to those facts. Get in touch with legislators like Waxman and Shays, start backing reforms that ensure a free and accurate flow of information, hold the press to the highest standards of accuracy and independence, and let the sunshine in.

Dr. Punnybone

Arrow Space