Amid big-time Washington news like the torture report, a nomination for attorney general and cameras for police officers, a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, or F.O.I.A., may seem pretty unsexy.
Apparently so, because it’s been mostly ignored by much of the mainstream media, including The Times, in recent days, as a retiring senator held up the legislation and it nearly went down the drain. That didn’t happen; the bill — a version of which received bipartisan support in the House — passed in the Senate on Monday with Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, releasing his hold.
The odd part about this is that journalists rely heavily on F.O.I.A. requests to get important information for their stories. Sometimes, they and their news organizations go to court to press those demands. And the information is used in major stories, including, for example, Eric Lipton’s recent investigation about state attorneys general and lobbyists’ efforts to influence them.
And the Obama administration — after promising transparency — has been properly criticized for being among the most secretive in recent history. The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization, has written about the administration’s poor record on F.O.I.A. requests.
To get the news about what was happening with F.O.I.A. — which allows the public and journalists to get the information they deserve from the federal government — you could have turned to the British press, where The Guardian described the situation pretty well. Ed Pilkington reported on the bill’s rocky status in the Senate, and then on its passage there:
The Senate has passed new legislation that challenges the ingrained secrecy of the US government and exposes federal agencies to greater public scrutiny, after the Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller dropped his opposition at the last minute.
In a day of high drama in the usually more sedate world of freedom of information campaigning, Rockefeller agreed to withdraw the block that he had effectively placed on the new legislation just hours before a final deadline. Open government advocates had warned that if he sustained his objections to the bill beyond Monday night there would be no hope of it passing in this Congress.
Shortly after 5 pm, the co-sponsor of the Foia Improvement Act of 2014, Senator Patrick Leahy, announced on Twitter that it had passed the Senate. The bill now moves back to the House of Representatives which is expected to speed it through before the end of session on Thursday.
The bill, which has been two years in the making, is backed by more than 70 good governance organisations and is seen as a critical step towards a more open and accountable flow of public information. Amy Bennett of OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of groups that have led the push for the changes, said that the Senate vote amounted to a “huge moment for making sure that the US is more open and accountable. It’s really critical for ensuring that we will never see a return to the kind of secrecy we saw under the Bush administration.”
After the bill passed late Monday, The Associated Press, The Hill, and Politico were among the news organizations to write articles, as did the Washington Post. Vice News has been following it all along, and Politico reported on it last Sunday.
Alex Howard, who writes about government, technology and society, tried on his blog and on Twitter to shame the mainstream press into covering it, as he was doing. He kept up a steady round of tweets about what the press and editorial boards were writing about, and what they weren’t.
Meanwhile, under the hashtags #opengov and #FOIA, Twitter was ablaze with interest. And for good reason. The act, which dates back to the 1960s, and was born out of a congressman’s deep frustration with his inability to get the government to provide information that belonged to the public, is important to news gathering and in fact, to the proper functioning of the American democracy. The new legislation strengthens it in important ways. (The House passed its own version of the bill last February.)
On Tuesday morning, I asked the Washington bureau chief, Carolyn Ryan, why The Times didn’t cover what was happening with F.O.I.A., either last summer or over the past week. She said she would provide a comment by the end of the day. I’ll add it here.
Mr. Howard finds the scant coverage by many large news organizations baffling. But, he noted, since the House still has to vote on the bill, news attention and an editorial push still have a chance to make a difference.
“They won’t spend a moment on this – I don’t get it,” he told me Monday. (The Times editorial board also has not taken up the subject; such editorials often follow news stories.)
After all, the FOIA improvements are clearly in the interest of the public and the press. And on this day, when government secrecy and the role of the press is very much on everyone’s mind, the importance can’t be overstated.
“This goes to the core of government accountability,” Mr. Howard said.
I agree. If the press won’t represent itself — and the people — by showing some interest in the free flow of government information, who will?
Updated, 5 p.m. Ms. Ryan responded Thursday afternoon saying that she and the Washington staff have been particularly busy but that she is “very interested in the subject, and in following the legislation.”
Although The Times still has not written about the legislation on the news side, it was good to see Dorothy Samuels write in support of the bill today on The Times’s Editorial Board’s blog. However, things aren’t looking particularly promising. Despite passing unanimously in the Senate on Monday, the House needed to pass the Senate’s version before Congress adjourns this week. It was up to Speaker John Boehner to put the bill on the calendar. But when asked about it during a press conference on Thursday, Speaker Boehner said, “I have no knowledge of what the plan is for that bill.”