Were you aware this past week was Sunshine Week? A national initiative spearheaded by the American Society of News Editors to inform the public about the importance of open government and the dangers of excessive and unnecessary “confidentiality.”
An open, transparent and accessible government is important not only to the media, but to a healthy and functioning community. It is vital to establishing and maintaining the people’s trust and confidence in their government and in the government’s ability to effectively serve its citizens.
Robert Freeman, executive director of New York’s Committee on Open Government for over 40 years– referred to as the “face” of access to public records in New York–suggests, “An uninformed public can do no good. Only with information can we contribute and improve the way we live. Ignorance really is not bliss. The more secrecy we have within our government, the less accountability.”
Interesting to note: the county administrator and certain elected officials, liken “accountability” to “bullying.”
Professor Sandy Davidson, School of Journalism at University of Missouri writes, “A clear indicator of whether a government is more totalitarian [centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience] or more democratic is the amount of access to information on how the government is functioning. Secrecy helps dreadful schemes go from dreadful dreams in perverted minds to perverted reality … knowing about the plotting leaves a vulnerability that knowledge can sometimes repair.”
One would hope…
Cook County taxpayers are certainly not immune to “dreadful schemes go[ing] from dreadful dreams in perverted minds to perverted reality.”
No need to elaborate here…
Author Bruce Coville, in a 2006 dissertation suggested, “Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of dictatorship.”
Tried lately requesting information from department heads or county officials? County personnel are instructed to direct all inquiries to the county administrator, lest county personnel stray from the tightly crafted and controlled narrative. There’s been a coordinated effort, under this administrator, to insulate information from public scrutiny.
Given my understanding of the word “public,” one would think government information gathered at the public’s expense …belongs to the public.
Thomas Friedman, The New York Times columnist and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner cautions, “Governments that try to control information are fighting a losing battle and if they bother trying, will face exorbitant costs.”
Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz theorized– during an Oxford lecture “On Liberty, the Right to Know, and Public Disclosure”–“One of the incentives public officials have for pursuing secrecy is that secrecy provides the opportunity for special interests to have greater sway.”
It has been suggested the practice of routinely withholding information from the public creates “subjects” rather than “citizens.” Regrettably, many of our local citizenry have been made to feel as “subjects” when they find themselves under the gavel of present leadership.
Veteran journalist Bill Moyers discloses, “Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of: no watchman to check the door, no accountant to check the books, no judge to check the law. The secret government has no constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up.”
I can certainly attest to this as a former county commissioner.
Checks and balances provide few checks and little balance when officials broker deals behind closed doors and conceal documents that contain important information that the public has the right, and often the need, to know. Those same officials preferring to rely on information “tweaked” in support of pre-determined outcomes.
Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Harvard Law School and former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University concludes, “As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy.”
K. K. Mathew, former judge of the Supreme Court of India–highly regarded for his scholarship and for his seminal contribution to the constitutional and administrative law in India–held, “The responsibility of officials to explain or to justify their acts is the chief safeguard against oppression.”
The final aim…the voting of wise decisions!
“The welfare of the community requires that those who decide issues shall understand them. They must know what they are voting about. And this, in turn, requires that so far as time allows, all facts and interests relevant to the problem shall be fully and fairly presented.
“As the self-governing community seeks, by the method of voting, to gain wisdom in action, it can find it only in the minds of its individual citizens.
…If they fail, it fails.”
–Alexander Meiklejohn,
Free Speech and Its Relation
to Self-Government,
Harper Brothers (1948).
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
Leave a Reply