Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad―how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.
Author(s): David E. Pozen, Michael Schudson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Commentary: Transparency, FOIA, Freedom Of Information
Pages: 352
Table of Contents
......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
Introduction: Troubling Transparency, by David E. Pozen and Michael Schudson
......Page 12
Part I: FOIA’s Historical and Conceptual Foundations
......Page 22
1. How Administrative Opposition Shaped the Freedom of Information Act, by Sam Lebovic
......Page 24
2. Positive Rights, Negative Rights, and the Right to Know, by Frederick Schauer
......Page 45
3. FOIA as an Administrative Law, by Mark Fenster
......Page 63
Part II: FOIA and the News Media
......Page 82
4. The Other FOIA Requesters, by Margaret B. Kwoka
......Page 84
5. State FOI Laws: More Journalist-Friendly, or Less?, by Katherine Fink
......Page 102
6. FOIA and Investigative Reporting: Who’s Asking What, Where, and When—and Why It Matters, by James T. Hamilton
......Page 127
Part III: Theorizing Transparency Tactics......Page 144
7. The Ecology of Transparency Reloaded, by Seth F. Kreimer
......Page 146
8. Monitoring the U.S. Executive Branch Inside and Out: The Freedom of Information Act, Inspectors General, and the Paradoxes of Transparency, by Nadia Hilliard
......Page 177
9. Output Transparency vs. Input Transparency, by Cass R. Sunstein
......Page 198
10. Open Data: The Future of Transparency in the Age of Big Data, by Beth Simone Noveck......Page 217
11. Striking the Right Balance: Weighing the Public Interest in Access to Agency Records Under the Freedom of Information Act, by Katie Townsend and Adam A. Marshall
......Page 237
Part IV: Comparative Perspectives
......Page 258
12. The Global Influence of the United States on Freedom of Information, by Kyu Ho Youm and Toby Mendel
......Page 260
13. Transparency as Leverage or Transparency as Monitoring? U.S. and Nordic Paradigms in Latin America, by Gregory Michener
......Page 280
14. Structural Corruption and the Democratic-Expansive Model of Transparency in Mexico, by Irma Eréndira Sandoval-Ballesteros
......Page 302
List of Contributors
......Page 322
Index
......Page 326
