It’s the time of year when thoughts turn to sunshine

It’s the time of year when thoughts turn to sunshine

You might not know it to look out the window, but this is Sunshine Week.

It has nothing to do with the weather, It is an annual event sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

And this year it falls at a particularly opportune time for public reflection on what open government means to a nation.

There is, of course, a presidential election under way, making this a particularly good time to press the three candidates at the head of the pack on how their administrations would be more open to the people.

There is a war going on — entering its sixth year today — and questions remain about how we managed to pursue a war on such bad intelligence, how the length and cost of the war could have been so woefully underestimated and why it took more than four years to relearn what had been learned a generation earlier, that conventional techniques don’t work against an insurgency.

Increasing numbers of reporters are being threatened with jail time and their news organization held hostage to enormous fines as prosecutors and judges attempt to turn reporters into another arm of the government. Perhaps they don’t care that when reporters don’t have reasonable latitude in doing their jobs there will be no reporters, or perhaps that’s the aim.

Hundreds of thousands of Freedom of Information requests filed with government agencies are languishing, and despite a pledge by President Bush in 2005 that the government would do a better job of responding, virtually no progress has been made.

A public matter

These and other sunshine issues are often seen as inside baseball, mattering only to reporters and editors and media companies. But there is strong evidence that the public wants the government to be open and transparent. Yet according to a new poll, only 20 percent believe the federal government is open, down from 33 percent just two years ago.

The poll by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University, commissioned by the ASNE, found that almost three-quarters of Americans found the federal government closed and secretive and that the percentage that consider it “very secretive” has doubled to 44 percent from 22 percent in 2006.

That is a dangerous perception for people to have in a democracy, and the next president should be put on the record now as being committed to reversing the trend.

Local and state governments fared better in the survey: 56 percent felt their local government was open or somewhat open and 50 percent felt that way about their state government.

The poll found that for offices for president, through Congress, the governor’s mansion, the state Legislature right down to the city council and school board, Americans, by around 90 percent, rated a candidate’s position on open government as somewhat important or very important.

Candidates for public office should take note. Open and transparent government is not only good public policy, it’s good politics.