John Tedesco

If you’ve ever had to deal with a government agency that tried to withhold public documents from you, check out Steve Myers’ interview with one of the authors of a new book and blog, The Art of Access.

Instead of focusing on the intricacies of open-records laws, David Cuillier and Charles Davis write about the social dynamics between people who ask for records, and the gatekeepers who decide whether to release them. Cuillier says:

It’s crucial to understand the constraints agencies work under to be more effective in getting what you need. Those folks don’t come to work with horns and cloven hooves. There is a whole bureaucratic world that thinks differently than requesters. Understand that world, and you’ll navigate around it much better.

One technique the pair discuss on their blog is checking the job postings at government agencies to understand the agency’s attitude towards open government.

By coincidence, the same week I learned about this open-records blog, there was local news about BexarMet’s ousted gatekeeper T.J. Connolly, who pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations. We had written many stories about Connolly, one of which detailed his efforts to delay an open-records request at BexarMet. “I want to be as uncooperative as possible … without being obvious,” Connolly wrote to BexarMet officials.

How did we learn about these stonewalling tactics? After Connolly and his supporters left the agency, we asked for their e-mails under the Texas Public Information Act. Under the new leadership at BexarMet, the agency was eager to appear more open, and handed over thousands of e-mails.

So the authors of The Art of Access are making a very important point: The culture of an agency plays a huge part in determining how much access you get.

Here’s what I remember about Walter Cronkite: In this interview with David Letterman after 9/11, Cronkite talked about the importance of the media reporting on the government’s planned invasion of Afghanistan.

Everyone talks about the public’s right to know, but Cronkite took it a step further by saying: “We have a duty to be kept informed.”

To make his point, he talked about German civilians who, at the end of World War II, expressed shock at the concentration camps in their own backyard:

They didn’t know what was going on behind those walls. Well, I can believe some of them may not have known. Maybe many of them didn’t know. But they were just as guilty as the Nazis themselves for what happened because they applauded when Hitler shut down their newspapers and shut down their radio and they said, ‘We don’t need to know. We trust our government.’ They became guilty when they did that. We have to know, as a duty.