Freedom To Know - by Cecile Wehrman
Freedom To Know Grow Complicated
By Cecile Wehrman, NDNA Executive Director
Sunshine Week is a time when news organizations try to increase awareness about your right to know. These days, while no rights have actually been taken away, access to information is under assault.
Some issues are unique whether federal, state or local government information is the issue, but if the end result is a lack of transparency, we’re all losing.
On the federal level, in addition to a huge backlog of FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests – some people wait months or even years to receive information they are entitled to – cuts to government programs and the outright removal of previously available material is just as concerning.
The federal government can rightly say a record does not exist if it has been destroyed. But even more insidious refusals of information have been identified in recent studies – from outright rejection of requests over technicalities, failure to immediately answer a post card seeking your affirmation you are “still interested” in receiving the records, to different treatment of requests based on who is asking, a journalist, advocacy group, or private citizen.
On the state and local level, new ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) regulations requiring government websites to be accessible to people with disabilities is creating a huge amount of work and worry for government employees. So much so, as reported recently by the North Dakota Monitor, there’s already been discussion about removing some older material for fear it will result in a fine if it doesn’t comply.
In other words, while everyone can agree people with disabilities need the same access to government information as everyone else, everyone would be harmed if some information is removed from public consumption, even if wide swaths of people would still benefit from it in whatever form it does exist. In fact, a provision of the law allows some latitude for “archived” material, so contemplating a preemptive removal would seem unnecessary.
On the local level, minutes of government meetings are probably the most widely consumed records, because every four years, people vote on their publication, 89 percent of municipal voters approved publication of minutes in 2024. But did you know minutes supplied by cities for publication are allowed to be abbreviated? This means, effectively, that the minutes you find on your city’s website may not be identical to what’s published in the newspaper.
State law gives cities this latitude in an effort to save money, but if it results in minutes that don’t adequately inform citizens about what’s being discussed, does it follow the spirit of the law? A recent example of abbreviated minutes from a meeting in a North Dakota town made it difficult to decipher what action was taken. And, as is allowable under the law, left out issues raised during public discussion (which is one way residents may learn there are others in town concerned about the same topic.)
Now comes AI, which may not strictly hamper access to government information, but potentially hijacks it by providing a summary on a search engine before you ever find a link to the original source. While AI summaries are handy for asking random trivia, you shouldn’t rely on it to accurately tell you about a city ordinance or state law.
Another technological concern at all levels of government is commercial requests for public information, potentially large datasets companies request and maybe even sell, for marketing appeals, the collection of which eats up the time of public servants. It may seem like a good thing to preclude these entities from gaining access to taxpayer information, but only if it doesn’t also place limits on journalism.
It’s important to remember that government information is information you paid for. You literally own it. News organizations must have access to it in order to help keep you informed.