The Watchdog Joins the Fray:: The Press, Records Audits, and State Access Reform

When Don Asher moved from Illinois in 1996 to serve as the Times of Northwest Indiana's Porter County editor, it did not take long for him to become frustrated with Indiana's public records law. "Not that Illinois was perfect," he later conceded, "In fact, I had always thought that law was pretty miserable. But Indiana's seemed even worse."1After venting to his editor, Asher was given the green light to "do something about it," and two years later, seven Indiana newspapers published a Freedom of Information (FOI) series that featured a groundbreaking records audit-an undercover survey of public agencies that reported how often they released records deemed public by state law. Based on attempts to obtain five types of public record, the audit found agencies to be "routinely" violating Indiana's public records statute. The project jump-started access reform in Indiana. Within months of its publication, the governor had appointed a Public Access Counselor to mediate access disputes, and by the following year, the General Assembly had codified the position, thus strengthening the state's public records law.About a fourteen-hour drive to the east, Brown University Professor Ross Cheit was sitting at a town hall meeting organized by ACCESS/RI, a FOI coalition that was trying for the second time to push a bill through the Rhode Island legislature. Cheit, one of the coalition's founding members, was struck by one citizen's suggestion: someone should conduct a public records survey to galvanize public support for the bill. A survey like this, he said, seemed like the perfect project for his political science class. ACCESS/RI financed the audit, the students carried it out, and Cheit released the final report at a press conference. The Providence Journal reported the findings on its front page and published follow-up pieces, including one that tied the state's recent credit union and state mortgage agency scandals to the state's need for access reform. A year later, modest changes to Rhode Island's Access to Public Records Act had been signed into law.The Indiana and Rhode Island projects were not the first records audits conducted in the United States.2 They were, however, the first ones to report compliance statistics across an entire state. Also, with the publicity from several national awards-Indiana's "State of Secrecy" series won the Freedom of Information Award from the Associated Press Media Editors (APME), the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award, and the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Freedom of Information Medal-the idea of a statewide records audit spread through journalism circles across the nation. Within two years, another ten statewide audits had been conducted, in addition to at least a dozen local and regional audits.At first blush, the audits from Indiana and Rhode Island seem to present contrasting models of a records audit. The first was a classic piece of investigative journalism conducted by seven newspapers whose coordination made possible a project of expansive journalistic scope. The second emerged from a combination of academic and advocacy agendas: a political science course, student auditors, and an access coalition whose members hoped to see legislative reform. But a closer examination reveals blurred lines and convergences among players, institutions, and political roles. The Indiana audit, for instance, was conducted over the objections of the Hoosier State Press Association (HSPA), whose attorneys feared the project's aggressive approach would result in a governmental backlash against the state press. Thus, after the series was published, it was the audit's creators-journalists, not press association lobbyists- who made an appointment with the governor and demanded he take action to address the lack of compliance unveiled by their audit. In Rhode Island, Ross Cheit, professor and advocate, was not the only one wearing two hats. So was Tom Heslin, the executive director of ACCESS/RI and editor of the Providence Journal. …