SPJ plays host to Sunshine Week discussion
Published March 16, 2007
In hopes of shedding some light on Sunshine Week, an annual celebration to increase awareness of freedom of information, the Society of Professional Journalists sponsored a discussion Tuesday.
In December, members of the MU SPJ chapter started Sunshine Week by pilot testing a Sunshine Law audit program, SPJ President Ryan Wallace said. In the exercise, members sent sunshine requests for emergency response plans to Boone, Calloway and Cole Counties.
Wallace said the program was a test for a national Sunshine Week initiative, but he said he wasn't sure if it was adopted nationally.
Tuesday's event was held in an effort to educate students and staff members about freedom of information issues.
"Sunshine Week is important because it allows citizens and journalists to celebrate people's right to information," Wallace said.
The event featured a recording of a streamed video Web cast from OpenTheGovernment.org, a Web site that advocates reducing secrecy in the government and expanding openness of government information.
Although the Sunshine Week Web site stated that the initiative is non-partisan, the video frequently criticized President George Bush's administration and its stance on information freedom.
"It was pretty critical, and it was pretty frequently critical," SPJ adviser Charles Davis said during the discussion of the video. "It was partisan."
But Davis said the panel was intentionally composed of both conservative and liberal speakers.
Davis is also the executive director of the National Freedom of Information Coalition.
The two expert panels featured in the Web cast discussed government secrecy as it relates to scientific study. The first panel discussed the federal government and the Freedom of Information Act. The second discussed state-level sunshine laws.
The first panel included Francesca Grifo, Rick Piltz, Susan Wood and Jay Dyckman. Grifo is the director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Piltz resigned from the U.S. Climate Change Program to protest the Bush administration's global warming position. Wood was a Federal Drug Administration official who quit to protest the delay of releasing Plan B emergency contraception. Piltz works at the National Coalition against Censorship as the director of The Knowledge Project.
The second panel was made up of Dorothy Biggs, Rob Thompson and Mark Tapscott. Biggs was a librarian at the Environmental Protection Agency. Thompson is an advocate for the North Carolina Public Interest Research Group. Tapscott is the editorial page editor of the Washington Examiner.
The Columbia Daily Tribune, the Radio Television News Directors Association and the Society of American Business Editors also sponsored the event.
Wallace said he expected a much larger audience for the presentation, especially because students from the Principles of American Journalism class were offered extra credit for attending.
"We were expecting a lot of those students to show up," Wallace said. "It was kind of embarrassing to hold it in a 400-person auditorium and look out and see 25 or 30 people."
Sunshine Week is sponsored nationally by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
In February, the MU chapter of SPJ received a $1,000 grant for programs during Ethics Week, which runs April 22-28.
Wallace said the group would hold a discussion with an ESPN ombudsman who would discuss his role as a liaison between viewers and editorial staff.