Alert 9/12/05
9/12/05
The Society of Environmental Journalists has released a new, anecdotal study of reporters experiences with the Freedom of Information Act based on interviews with 55 of their members. The experiences are important indictors the problems reporters increasingly face in getting information from government agencies. A pdf version is attached.
It’s also available at http://www.sej.org/foia/SEJ_FOIA_Report2005.pdf
I’d ask two things:
Please circulate this to all of your members.
In doing so, please ask them to let us know about their own experiences,
if any, with the federal FOIA. pweitzel@rcfp.org
We want to build a case file that has strong, government-wide examples of the of
the problems journalists are having, from delays to refusals to fee issues, and
we’d also want to build a file of stories that resulted from FOIA that served
strong public interests.
Pete Weitzel
