For those of you interested in the Senate hearings on the legislation to update the FOIA being sponsored by Sens Cornyn and Leahy, they begin at 10:00AM EST today (Tuesday March 15) and can be heard via streaming audio at the CapitolHearings.org site that CSPAN runs for Senate hearings. Just scroll down to Judiciary -- Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security Subcommittee.

... of open, accountable government and our system of checks and balances -- including the press -- doing its job, there's this side-splitting piece of work from the normally rather staid Independent Institute, courtesy MaxSpeaks.

But then again, as Eric Martin asks, "Why bother to revise history when you can bury it?"

A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. President James Madison

If I were a betting woman, I'd say it's pretty good odds that most bloggers aren't aware that today marks opening day of the first national Sunshine Week. What, you may ask, is Sunshine Week? The NYT sums it up as " a weeklong campaign for government openness spearheaded by the AP and more than 50 news outlets, journalism groups, universities and the American Library Association."

The whole thing got started in 2002 with Sunshine Sunday in Florida, an initiative to heighten public awareness of the importance of access to information and government accountability in the wake of 9/11, which had opened the floodgates for some "particularly egregious open government exemptions" considered by the Florida state legislature. As Barbara Patterson, who helped organize the first Sunshine Sunday, explains in American Editor (pdf p. 10), the newsletter of the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

Any opposition to the proposed bills was summarily dismissed by sponsors and lobbyists as a “press problem,” even though most of the proposals raised serious constitutional issues and would have curtailed the public’s ability to hold its government accountable. A “press” problem?

Since the first Sunshine Sunday -- selected as the Sunday before James Madison's birthday, which is National Freedom of Information Day -- several other states have joined in. The impact in Florida has been considerable, if measured by the new-found sensitivity of both state legislators and the public, which voted overwhelmingly in the 2002 general election for a measure limiting the ability of the legislature to restrict open access. Probably most important, according to Patterson:

Legislators and other key government officials have begun to realize that being tagged as a supporter of open government is a good thing.

The recognition that being seen as an open government advocate is good for your political health seems to be slowly catching on in Washington as well -- on both sides of the aisle. Here's Sen John Cornyn (R-Texas) in an op-ed he penned for Sunshine Week about the new FOIA legislation he and Sen Leahy are introducing.

Just last month, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a longtime champion of open government at the federal level, and I joined forces to introduce the OPEN Government Act of 2005, to strengthen and enhance our federal open government laws. It has been nearly a decade since Congress has approved major reforms to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And the Senate Judiciary Committee has not convened an oversight hearing to monitor compliance with FOIA since 1992. So this week, I will chair a Senate hearing to examine needed improvements to our open government laws.

The legislation we introduced contains important Congressional findings to reiterate and reinforce our belief that the Freedom of Information Act establishes a presumption of openness, and that our government is based not on the need to know, but upon the fundamental right to know.
[...]
Moreover, our legislation is not just pro-openness, pro-accountability, and pro-accessibility—it is also pro-Internet. It requires government agencies to establish a hotline to enable citizens to track their FOIA requests, including Internet tracking, and grants the same privileged FOIA fee status currently enjoyed by traditional media outlets to bloggers and others who publish reports on the Internet. [ed. emph added]

There are actually two pieces of proposed legislation being sponsored by Cornyn and Leahy: the OPEN Government Act of 2005, announced Feb 16, and the Faster FOIA Act introduced March 10. The latter bill would establish a 16-member advisory Commission on Freedom of Information Act Processing Delays, which would report back within a year to Congress and the President on ways to reduce delays (including fee issues) in the processing of FOIA requests.

Now the last bit -- that bloggers may get reduced FOIA fees -- seems to have permeated the blogosphere's collective consciousness. However, the big brouhaha about blogging-press-government relations has been over the Apple litigation, covered here by Donna Wentwoth at CopyFight. Most of the other blogging-press-government flap-a-doodle has been devoted to the FEC-related firestorms (so far more smoke than fire). But a quick Googling didn't find much attention by the blogosphere to the FOIA initiatives, beyond an effort launched last week by the student activist IP-oriented site FreeCulture.org to promote a blogshine Sunday. And CopyFight is one of the few spots I've found with a blogshine.org button and blogging about the Cornyn-Leahy legislation.

The public's access to information and -- equally important -- how information intermediaries and consumers choose to use that information, ought to be a major focus of the blogosphere of "ideas," whether politics or science and technology, medicine, environment, social services, law and law enforcement, labor relations, financial services, education, you name it. For the great majority of blogs that aren't engaged directly in electoral politics or who don't see themselves competing with "journalists," the ability to access the vast amount of information that federal, state and local governments have collected, analyzed and archived is far more important than the debates over "who is a journalist" and whether/how blogs will be regulated if they support partisan activities.

The first reason why open access is important is the "business model" issue. If blogs are to be something more than partisan voices or provide more than entertaining critiques of stories developed in the mainstream commercial media, one major type of blogging will be digging into substantive topics requiring some background knowledge, pulling disparate pieces together, and bringing stories and analysis to a broader audience of interested readers. These are the sorts of activities that few news organizations can afford these days, or at least not on the range of subjects that the blogosphere is capable of covering.

Niche blogs offer the prospect of important stories being identified, fleshed out and debated with attention to detail by people who are knowledgeable about the subject area even if their "business" isn't blogging. Bloggers, unlike most news organizations, also have the ability to stay with a story that interests them for a long time, even after it's moved off the "hot" list.

But the success of this model of blogging depends on widespread, low cost access to raw material -- information. Collecting information isn't the blogosphere's competitive advantage -- that remains and will remain, even with the advent of citizens media, the competitive advantage of commercial media in many instances (though whether they will exploit that advantage is a different matter). But the public sector is also a major source of that raw material. Open access to information in the hands of governments is a critical element of this emerging role of the blogosphere going forward.

The second reason why open access is important is the "functioning democracy" issue, where the blogosphere has an important potential role to play in the coming years. I count myself among those concerned about info-tainment increasingly dominating much of what passes for news and analysis, as well as the trend for government and corporate communication machinery to find congenial forums to pass off counterfeit "objective" information to suit their persuasion agendas.

I also believe, however, that the impulse to counter these trends with ownership or content rules is often a misguided one. Rules are easily gamed by those they are supposed to control or, when the rules are binding, turn out to have some unfortunate unintended consequences. More often than not, the benefits of new rules inure to those with vested interests, unless the changes are truly revolutionary, and then the outcomes are likely to be highly unpredictable.

Technology and the changing economics of media are, in fact, offering the beginnings of a revolution. I was intrigued by a recent analogy attributed to Joe Trippi, that blogging and e-media today are about where we were with television in 1955 when it comes to politics. That suggests lots and lots of changes ahead, not just in content and technology of communication itself, but in all sorts of social structures and patterns about how we use different forms of media and what we expect from them.

I for one would prefer to focus on enabling that revolution. Opening more space for ideas, and ensuring open access to and flow of information, seems to me preferable to trying to make the existing large commercial information gatekeepers perform "better." This is especially the case as the very gatekeeping role for large corporate media is being redefined with technology and competition, and the cost of producing and distributing ideas and information is declining so dramatically.

So with that lecture on why sunshine is important to all of us -- as both citizens and bloggers -- here's some info on what's on tap for Sunshine Week. Of course, check out the extensive website that the sponsors of Sunshine Week have assembled, including calendars of goings on all over the country. They've got lots of great background material on the First Amendment and FOIA as well as "toolkits" (articles, op-eds and even editorial cartoons) for their participating newspapers to run. AND you can order your very own bright yellow "sunshine in government" wristbands. Knew you wouldn't want to pass that one up.

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings are on Tuesday, March 15 at 10:00AM. Editor & Publisher has a summary of some of the events scheduled for Sunshine Week in various locations. Here in DC, in addition to the hearings that are being held by Cornyn et al on Tuesday, the big events are:

The National FOI Day Conference will be held March 16 at the Freedom Forum's center in Arlington, Virginia. Speakers include Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), Cox Washington bureau chief Andy Alexander, and First Amendment attorney Lee Levine. The event is free and open to the public.

A symposium titled "Confronting the Seduction of Secrecy: Toward Improved Government Access on the Record" will be held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on March 17. The event will begin at 8:30 a.m. with a continental breakfast and conclude at 10:45 a.m. This is the 5th Annual Curtis Hurley Symposium and is co-sponsored by the Missouri School of Journalism. The event will be moderated by Geneva Overholser and will feature as panelists Bill Kovach, Tom Curley, Mike McCurry, Jack Shafer, and others. For more information or to register, e-mail Billie Dukes at dukesb@missouri.edu.

Coming up next on chez Nadezhda for Sunshine Week -- "how to get Congress to walk the walk" -- or how to save poor Steven Aftergood from the totally unnecessary chore of being our sole online source of Congressional Research Service reports, which are controlled by our elected representatives to dole out when it makes them look good or makes a constituent happy.

{March 14 12:56AM EST -- updated to correct graphics & links; added several links & trackbacks}

But seriously, is this supposed to be some kind of new form of argumentation whereby you cite evidence that completely eviscerates your point and then claim you're right?

Public television, its supporters say, is especially important for people who cannot afford cable or satellite television. But 62 percent of poor households have cable or satellite television, and 78 percent have a VCR or DVD player.

George Will to 38% percent of poor households: you do not exist.

As for his larger point ... really now. Television completely sucks in terms of transmitting actual information and ideas, and everyone knows it. And come on, George Will has PBS written all over him! Bowties? Also funny how Will mentions BBC America in his list of other channels worth watching.

PBS is the last DJ.

A Thought: Maybe he's just lashing out because his show is cratering?