Why public records are important to the public

by Ira Chinoy

When used well, public records are among the most important tools available to American journalists. Beat reporters may check them to see whether officials they cover are twisting the truth. Small-town newspapers gather them into lists documenting the details of daily life — home sales, new incorporations, and street-by-street crime reports. Investigative reporters scour them to uncover startling facts that affect people in the most profound ways.

When Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick was tipped off by workers at a government-owned uranium processing plant that it had been contaminated by radioactivity, he knew there would be no story without evidence. He found much of it by poring through documents the plant was required to keep on file in a public reading room. “Data hidden in obscure studies, footnotes and charts confirmed everything workers had told us,’’ said Warrick. He reported that the contamination had turned up in the Kentucky plant’s work areas, locker rooms and cafeterias, and even in neighboring creeks and private wells. Reviewing other public records, including death certificates, the newspaper found evidence suggesting elevated rates of leukemia among plant employees, whose cancer deaths had been privately tracked by plant operators but never studied in a scientific way by impartial investigators with access to medical and work records. The federal government, which earlier downplayed the risks to workers, was prompted to apologize and agreed to compensate current and former workers for what was done to them.

Just what constitutes a public record varies from place to place. The concept, at its heart, is that records maintained by government agencies about their operations and the activities they regulate should be open to the public. There are exceptions, of course. Federal records affecting national security or pending criminal investigations are exempt, as are trade secrets and certain personal records that would constitute an invasion of privacy if released. But if a federal agency withholds records, it bears the burden of explaining why. States have enacted similar laws spelling out what can and cannot be disclosed.

Municipal budgets, payrolls, tax assessments, road construction bids, snow removal contracts, housing permits and school fire safety reports are typical public records. So are business licenses, real estate deeds and the forms filled out during government inspections of restaurants, nursing homes and food processing plants. Most documents filed in civil and criminal courts are public. Some government offices are in the business of auditing other government offices, and those reports are generally public, too.

With these and other records reporters can begin to answer questions about what government does, whether it is doing what it should, and whether officials are abusing the public trust for themselves or their friends. Access to government records is part of what allows the news media and others to answer these questions independently of the way the officials themselves would respond.

Those who aspire to elected office and their supporters also leave a trail of records. Voter registration lists are public. So are reports of campaign contributions. While examining such records for the Kansas City Star, reporter Joe Stephens spotted a cluster of workers from a Massachusetts pool toy manufacturer — including secretaries and others of modest means — who were writing $1,000 checks to Kansas Republican Bob Dole’s presidential primary campaign in 1995. Some were registered Democrats and at least one was not registered to vote at all. Following those leads, Stephens was able to report that the source of some contributions was not the donors’ own money, as required by law, but piles of cash supplied by an aide to the company’s founder, a Dole fund-raiser who was said to have an interest in becoming an ambassador. The story led to a felony conviction, home confinement and record fines for the wealthy businessman, whom the judge accused of using “tainted money to pollute the political system.”

Public records are not confined to paper. Court rulings and new laws have permitted greater access to government records stored in electronic form. A Rhode Island judge ruled in the 1985 that the Providence Journal was entitled to certain computerized records of the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation, a state agency that financed low-rate mortgages for first-time home buyers. As a result, reporters could detect significant patterns among thousands of transactions. They discovered that sons and daughters of powerful state officials were getting loans at rates below those being offered to the general public.

Some people might shudder to think that their driving records are public, but computerized traffic court records have been used to report on troubling patterns in the traffic history of school bus drivers and leniency in the treatment of drunk drivers.

Federal law provides much less access to records detailing the inner workings of Congress than it does for other agencies. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 contained mysterious wording that appeared to provide hundreds of loopholes tailor-made for specific companies and individuals, but Congress provided little public information linking each tax break to its intended recipient. Working from available clues, however, veteran investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele, then with the Philadelphia Inquirer, spent 15 months examining all sorts of other public records trying to “crack the code,” as Steele later put it. Their disclosures that the act’s beneficiaries included the lawmakers’ friends, big campaign contributors, and some of the wealthiest Americans infuriated ordinary taxpayers and earned the pair their second Pulitzer Prize.

Even when access to records is guaranteed by law, other barriers exist. Legitimate requests are routinely denied, and the appeal process can be time consuming and costly. Some agencies are notorious for delays — lasting months and even years — in providing documents. Though fees may be waived, some departments have done the opposite, requiring payments for paper or electronic copies far beyond what it would cost to produce them. And some records, even when released, are of dubious quality. There have been controversies, for example, over the accuracy of crime statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from police agencies across the country. In several cities journalists and other investigators found that police displayed a pattern of underreporting violent crime.

One other barrier to the effective use of public records is not in government offices but in newsrooms. Reporters may not turn to documents and databases nearly as often as the law entitles them to, either because they lack the time, the initiative or the awareness. Organizations such as Investigative Reporters and Editors provide training, conferences and publications through which journalists adept at using public records can share what they have learned about the process.

At one of those conferences, Barlett and Steele, now with Time magazine, talked about their decades of experience using records. “Reading a document the third or fourth time,” said Steele, “you will see things that were not there the first time.” While young reporters may have grand visions of finding that one “blockbuster document,” he said, the reality is that “documents are like a jigsaw puzzle. You find one piece here, one piece there, another over there. Every one of those pieces is so important to that end picture.”

In the end, public records and what they may reveal are important to journalists because they are important to everyone. Though the rights and means of access have changed over time, the underlying concept is not new. America’s founders believed that public knowledge about the affairs of government was vital. Journalist Walter Lippmann, an evangelist for accurate reporting, voiced a similar sentiment in 1919. “There can be no liberty,” he wrote, “for a community which lacks the information with which to detect lies.”

Ira Chinoy, formerly a journalist with The Providence Journal and The Washington Post, teaches journalism at the University of Maryland.