Lorain, Ohio, school-board members bypassed scrutiny and met privately to discuss closing a high school. Washington state legislators agreed to open budget meetings only after persistent media lobbying. Last summer, Presstime conducted a fax poll asking publishers to share their most important First Amendment issues. More than half of the 100 publishers and editors responding cited open meetings and records as chief worries. Jane E. Kirtley, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, Va., says no data support the widely held notion that government officials routinely deny access to meetings and records.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that such problems are increasing, however.
Access issues and Freedom of Information Act requests constitute a growing proportion of the calls for help that RCFP receives. And the federal government alone currently harbors a backlog of 30,000 FOI requests. When RCFP was founded in the 1970s, government officials often cited national security when refusing to release information. As computers pile up more data, government officials now point to citizen's privacy fears when withholding what are often deemed public facts. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 provides an example.