Last November, California voters approved Proposition 59, which strengthened public access to government records.
Now the California First Amendment Coalition and two newspapers have filed suit against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to force disclosure of records of meetings between his top aides and people outside the governor's office, including lobbyists, campaign contributors and representatives of special interests.
"The public interest in seeing who attends meetings with the governor's top aides is even greater than seeing who the governor is meeting with," said Peter Scheer, executive director of CFAC.
The newspapers that have joined the lawsuit are the San Diego Daily Transcript and San Jose Mercury News.
1 comment:
I find it very interesting that we are to hold our governor and government officials accountable for such things, yet many times our newspapers are guilty from withholding such information from the public as they desire.
A good example of this deals with important figures in our local politics that maintain an air of anonymity in their efforts to steer our community to which the public in general is not aware.
In particular, these individuals have more than a close alliance with such entities as TRAQC and the Arts Leadership Alliance.
It would seem to me the First Amendment privilege extended to citizens in an effort to determine what their government is doing would, for reasons of parity alone, be extended into the unbiased coverage found in our local newspaper today.
The reason for the importance of presenting all of the information to the public, again, is to allow the public to reach a totally informed decision regarding various things that directly or indirectly affects it in regards to what happens at the local government level. Anything short of total disclosure of information in an unbiased format results in a form of social engineering along the biases of the writers and newspaper staff providing that information.
Posted by: Dave Hardesty at November 30, 2005 08:00 AM
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