By Toby McIntosh
I started collecting news articles based on access to information requests after a speaker at a conference wondered if anyone had any such examples.
On the occasion of International Day for Universal Access to Information (IDUAI), I’ll roll out some examples from 2023. Also in this article are some media reports on the health of access laws.
It’s a pretty random, personal collection, with an English language bias. I run various Google searches that dredge up news articles based on documents obtained through access requests. To qualify for the collection, the requests must have been made by reporters, not by academics, individual activists or nongovernmental organizations, although their findings often provide the valuable basis for news articles,
I have no idea how many requests journalists make overall. However, in the United States the percentage of FOI requests is below 10 percent.
Yet the stories in my little collection are impressive in their quality and variety. Maybe these examples will provide practical reminders on Sept. 28 about the benefit of access laws.
It’s clear that in many places the governments are hostile to access requests, such as in Malta.
Malta’s Labor Party government has gone to court often to appeal rulings made by the Information and Data Protection Tribunal in favor of media requesters. Although the government has lost every case so far, the persistent appeals impose a costly burden, particularly on The Shift, a small investigative publication. The government’s legal maneuvers amount to SLAPP suits (strategic lawsuits intended to prevent public participation) international press freedom groups have objected.
Yet despite such flagrant government resistance, Maltese investigative journalists (at The Shift, The Times of Malta and The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation) still manage to use the access law to rattle out information that the government would prefer to keep secret, particularly about government contracts and officials’ salaries.
Sampling News Articles Built on Access Requests
So here’s a small sampling of media articles from 2023 based on access to information requests.
Perhaps the most prominent example comes from Pakistan. The legal problems for former Prime Minister Imran Khan stem from his refusal to disclose details of the gifts he received. Reporter Rana Abrar pursued this using Right to Information Act (RTI) requests. (See an interview here.) When Khan was convicted this year, Abrar said, “This is a high-level transparency case and my struggle for right to information has been vindicated today.”
In California, Open Vallejo reporter Laurence Du Sault won the 2022 James Madison Freedom of Information Award for her “tireless and meticulous” investigation into the Vallejo Police Department. The probe involved examining more than 15,000 pages of police, forensic and court files related to the city’s 17 fatal police shootings since 2011, interviewing dozens of witnesses, and filing more than 50 public records requests. Open Vallejo also sued the city to obtain records the newsroom thought were unlawfully being withheld.
In India, Rupsa Chakraborty, writing in The Indian Express, won a prestigious first prize for “rural reporting” for her series about problems in the health system and the bad consequences for patients. According to the announcement, she not only did on-site fieldwork but also made RTI applications. The answers helped document approximately 2,500 child deaths and the deplorable state of health facilities in Nandurbar. (Article, paywall.)
In Australia, The Guardian used the Freedom of Information law to uncover an internal memo showing that Tasmania’s largest salmon company had tried to block the release of monitoring reports submitted to the state’s Environment Protection Agency about the use of antibiotics at its fish farms.
Speaking of salmon, a reporter for The Narwhale in Canada, Matt Simmons, was researching about how a pipeline might endanger spawning salmon and filed FOI requests. “He recently got back some documents — and boy are they full of jaw-dropping details,” according to a Narwhale article.
Back in India, The Wire’s Yaqut Ali used the RTI Act to get data showing an increase in gun licenses issued in Manipur, a region with fierce ethnic conflicts.
In the United Kingdom, Daily Mail reporter Patrick Tooher cited “figures obtained under a Freedom of Information request” showing that “more than a million bank accounts have been shut since 2019 – and the rate of closures is accelerating.”
Documents obtained by Katherine Masters of Reuters under the US FOI revealed that “[R]oughly 27% of tests performed on shoes and garments collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in May showed links to cotton from China’s Xinjiang region, which has been banned because of concerns over forced labor,” she reported. Another Reuters journalist, Jackie Botts, obtained and analyzed a dataset of drug seizures by CBP at ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexican border.
PublicSource, a nonprofit newsroom serving the Pittsburgh region, wrote about problems at Shell’s petrochemical complex after reviewing hundreds of documents. The story by Quinn Glabicki noted that the state withheld 1,426 records, claiming they were exempt from disclosure.
Also in the US, NBC’s Ryan J Reilly used FOI to get a document from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He reported:
One week before Election Day 2020 and just over two months before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an internal FBI analysis concluded that domestic violent extremists were “very willing to take action” in response to a disputed election but that “law enforcement preemption” and the “disorganization” of extremist groups “likely would hinder widespread violence.”
Reporting on the FOI Process Itself
It’s valuable when the media writes about the FOI system itself.
The Globe and Mail in Canada published a major report by Robyn Doolittle and Tom Cardoso called “How Canada’s FOI system broke under its own weight.”
In Ghana, a senior reporter with The Fourth Estate, Seth J. Bokpe, was named the best reporter on Democracy and Good Governance by the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA). His winning story involved tested the new RTI in Ghana. He wrote 36 RTI requests to 33 state institutions and found that that nearly 60% of the applications were refused.
In India, The Morung Express assessed the transparency of departmental websites of the Government of Nagaland and reported the rankings, which were based on a variety of criteria.
The Afghan National journalists Union (ANJU) recently surveyed 433 journalists working in all parts of the country, reported the International Federation of Journalists. The extensive survey “reveals access to information has hit a new low, while Government promises of a new media law to address this situation remain unfulfilled.” ICIJ summarized.
The Media Institute of South Africa published a report accessing the state of access to information in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. “The research adopts both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods and seeks to evaluate the level of public ATI held by governments and public organisations,” according to the report.
Disputes over Access is a study by Balticada Investigations Studio that examines journalists’ access to information mechanisms in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. After analyzing 15 disputes between journalists and public officials over restrictions to collect information, the study “seeks to provide a basis for policy change that would lead to improved sustainability within journalism in the Baltic States.”
The Ferret in Scotland reported that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency closed nearly 1,000 unanswered freedom of information requests without informing the requesters.
There are stories about setbacks, delays and denials. But occasionally there’s brighter news. Such as when a judge made New York City officials pay the New York Times Co. more than $44,000 in legal fees. And when a Missouri judge ordered the state to pay more than $240,000 in legal fees after finding that found the attorney general’s office “knowingly and purposefully” violated open records law.
Increasingly, news outlets are posting online the documents they obtain.
“MuckRock and The Missouri Independent are making all of the government documents it obtained as part of its “Atomic Fallout” investigation into the St. Louis region’s 75-year history with nuclear waste public and searchable,” the organizations announced.
We tend to hear about requests involving major issues, but FOI requests are made about many things. In Arkansas, texts and emails obtained under the state’s FOI act shed new light on problems for fans at a sports stadium, the Arkansas Times reported.
And sometimes requests generate unexpected, almost humorous, spin-offs. Connecticut Inside Investigator, a nonprofit newsroom, filed state FOI requests for seeking answers to the rising costs of a pier. Some of the e-mails revealed that Connecticut Port Authority members were very unhappy with the tone of much of the press coverage.
