The Fight Is the System — Journalism isn’t just crucial to democracy; It IS democracy

The room I stepped into was silent, waiting for me to speak. Closest to me were two interpreters, and surrounding the long table were judges and prosecutors from the judicial systems of Morocco and Tunisia, with more from Egypt and other parts of the Near East and North Africa. Going into the meeting I wasn’t thinking about the mechanisms of our Public Records Act, as I was there to speak on behalf of the Washington Coalition for Open Government for the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program. I was pondering the vast cultural and systemic differences between our countries.

I opened with the cultural underpinnings of our nation: rugged individualism and a fight for freedom and justice. We were built to fight for our rights. And we were built to distrust government. And in every state and at the national level, there is some expression of this in a public records act that gives people the right to the discovery of information about government activities. It is the underpinning of self-governance. And journalism, as the Fourth Estate, is the fight built into the system.

There isn’t anyone in the field of journalism that doesn’t sometimes feel like we’re losing the battle. Consider that, since 2008, newspapers have been closing at a pace of more than two per week, with newspaper newsroom jobs down 57% between 2008 and 2020. About 50 million Americans now have little or no access to local news. Meanwhile, compliance with public records access laws nationally has fallen from about half to roughly a third, while here in Washington the original 10 exemptions granted in 1972 when voters created the Public Records Act have grown to 700, journalists are being characterized as “vexatious requesters,” and the legislature is seeking a self-declared “privilege” to keep their communications private.
These erosions are not coincidentally timed; they are inextricably linked. The research bears it out: communities that lose their local news source see more government waste and higher taxes, and rising corruption in both government and private industry. Trust in this nation is not granted by virtue of our culture. Rather, we require trustworthiness to be proven every day.

After sharing the many types of information accessed, whether online chats, emails or other documents, one of the visitors asked me, “How does the average person make sense of all that data?” The answer, at its core, is investigation. And I shared that there are many citizens who take on that role of investigator of their local school board, or city council, exercising their right to know and their role in democracy. But on the whole, it can’t be done without journalists. And in that I lamented the loss of our industry’s strength in numbers. Losing reporters in the field, the very people who assimilate, assess, verify, and report, is losing democracy’s capacity to metabolize all that information.

I was unable to answer a question that has long vexed me: How do you shift a culture to create a system built on trust, and not a fight for truth. To be honest, I don’t have an answer for that. Nor do I really believe we can start over with a different cultural foundation. Here, the fight IS the system, not a byproduct. The answer isn’t a cultural shift; rather, it’s a cultural commitment! If anything, the solutions lie in strengthening the resources and broadening the reach of that journalism – the assimilation and sense making of our government’s machinations.

There is bright light in the answer to another of their questions: “Do you have to be a citizen to make a public records request?” In Washington State, you do not have to be a citizen to request information; everyone has a right to know. While that level of access isn’t available everywhere, and it can’t be taken for granted even here, it’s the ultimate egalitarian move. Information, in a fully functioning democracy, is publicly accessible. Period.

I hear every day that “journalism is crucial to democracy.” But I say that Journalism IS Democracy. It’s every single person’s right to information, citizen or non-citizen, elected official or woman on the street. It’s the right to ask questions and to form opinions, to weigh the facts and make sense of it all. The very Public Records Act discussed here was created by a citizen Initiative of the People – a form of lawmaking that piqued the interest of our visitors. The people showed up at the polls in 1972 to tell their legislators what they required: access to information.

We may be a nation founded on the fight for freedom to self-govern, but we’ve formed something more lasting. We’ve formed a democracy based on inquiry and action. It just requires us to show up, to do the hard work of maintaining our system. Showing up is the fight. It’s what journalists do every day. It’s what readers do when they open the newspaper or log on to a trusted news source. When we put down the devices that feed our outrage and do the harder work of patriotism – learning, understanding, and participating – we are embodying the very democracy we fought for.