Last month in Iowa, Mark Gannon and Arlen Nichols, a 47-year-old former university employee and a 75-year-old retiree, won a ruling from the Iowa Supreme Court ordering the three state universities to open up the records of their fund-raising foundations. Gannon and Nichols had wanted to know where the money raised by Iowa State University Foundation, a private contractor, came from and where it was going.

"We want things up front," Gannon told The Associated Press before the ruling, "where anybody can be watchdogs for the university."

Last month in Illinois, two Republican state senators, Dale Righter and Peter Roskam, won a court ruling that opened up the records of a contract between the state and a prescription drug company. The state senators wanted to know how much the state was paying for the prescription drugs.

"The people who are paying the bills - the taxpayers - should have a right to know how much they're being charged for the services that are being contracted for," Righter said at a statehouse news conference reported by The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill.

Across the country, advocates for open government records - citizens, lawmakers, journalists - fight frequent battles to see more of what their governments are doing. They win some, but, lately, they're losing more.

Local, state and federal governments increasingly are classifying documents as "secret" or merely "sensitive" and hiding them from public scrutiny. In some cases, government agencies even are withdrawing documents that already had been released, removing information that had been posted on government Web sites and denying more requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act and what are known as "sunshine" or open records laws.

This classic struggle in democracy too often is cast as the press versus the government, journalists against elected officials. True enough, journalists tend to have a proprietary view of sunshine laws. But the fight for open government records isn't about or for the press. It's about and for you, the public.

Laws requiring government meetings to be open mean that anybody, not just reporters, can sit in on the city council meeting. Laws requiring government contracts to be public documents, like those prescription drug contracts in Illinois, mean that taxpayers can see where their money is going. Laws that require a private contractor doing public business to maintain open records mean that donors and taxpayers can be watchdogs over the spending.

The increase in government secrecy since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks has spread the fight for more openness and more public accountability across partisan and ideological lines. Republicans and Democrats alike - from Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. - are uniting to oppose hiding too many government documents beyond public scrutiny. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, for example, has introduced legislation to modernize the Freedom of Information Act, now 39 years old, and speed up government responses under it.

This is the meaning of democracy: citizens, armed with information, able to hold their government accountable or to give their consent to their government's actions. In 1919, journalist and social philosopher Walter Lippmann vividly painted the connection between citizens' need for information and the strength of democracy: "There can be no liberty," he wrote, "for a community which lacks the information to detect lies."

Charlotte Grimes is the Knight Chair in Political Reporting at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She was a journalist for 25 years, 20 of them with the Post-Dispatch.

© 2005 Post-Dispatch

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