It’s Always Sunny (Opinion)
by March 22, 2010 12:00 am 119 views
No matter the weather forecast, recently it was Sunshine Week. It’s the week set aside by the American Society of News Editors to call attention to the importance of freedom of information laws in the United States.
The staff of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal and Arkansas Business makes use of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act on a weekly basis, and you, dear reader, are the direct beneficiary. If you enjoyed those lists of the top-selling restaurants, largest SBA lenders, and the highest paid state employees, it’s because that information is subject to the state FOI. If you check “Real Deals” each week to see who paid how much for a house, or marveled over Arkansas Business’ recent story about the creative pricing structure Rick Ferguson offered Steve Wortman on his estate in west Little Rock, or were astonished at the inconsistent disciplinary record of the Arkansas Medical Board – you can thank the state FOI for all of that.
Arkansas’ FOI remains one of the best in the country, despite some legislative whittling at the behest of protective special interests.
The federal Freedom of Information Act is not as generous, but it still allows us to tell you how much the major shareholders earned from the sale of First National Bank of Marianna to Farmers & Merchants of Stuttgart.
Oh, and to track the whereabouts of local businessmen who find themselves in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
So integral is the right to free flow of information to what we do for a living that it is almost impossible to imagine how newspapers existed before those rights were codified. Almost like imagining the news industry before the telephone – or the Internet, which has turbocharged the power of FOI laws from coast to coast.
In the pre-Internet days, we had to know what documents to request; today we can unleash the power of a Web search to find public information that we didn’t even know existed.
What Arkansans, and Americans in general, fail to appreciate, however, is that FOI laws are not just a tool for journalists.
You, too, can insist on the free flow of information from your government. Download a copy of the Arkansas FOI at ArkansasPress.org/publications/38-foi-handbook.