An overflowing crowd squeezed into the David Letterman Communications and Media Building Rm. 125 Monday to hear prominent journalists speak about the availability of public records.
Bill Nichols, managing editor of Politico.com, and Tony Fargo, associate professor of journalism at Indiana University, came to campus as part of the journalism department's Professional-in-Residence program.
Nichols said the issue of public records has been important among journalists in the past eight years due to Bush administration policies. Nichols said the trend in that time was to withhold information from the public, unless there was a good reason to release it.
"It was a time in which a frightening number of reporters were faced with the possibility of jail time," he said, "in which securing the most basic information from the Bush Administration was at times cause for mortal combat between government officials and the press."
Junior Kim Rasmussen said she didn't know the public had access to so many records and resources.
Nichols said a sign of hope is Congress considering a federal shield law. Shield laws protect reporters from releasing confidential sources. They are becoming increasingly important, he said.
Fargo expanded on Nichols points, saying Congress began to worry about information access during the Bush administration. In response, it passed the Open Government Act in 2007. However, President Bush moved the agency in charge of overseeing the new standards to the Department of Defense, where journalists typically were met with more opposition, he said.
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