On the one hand, these laws are useful tools to expose public information that, in truth, belongs to the public. On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we should not have to “force” officials to reveal information that we own — but they want to keep secret.
In too many instances, government’s knee-jerk response to the most routine request for information isn’t an answer, but an instruction: “File an FOI request.”
Likewise, reporters can come to over-rely on FOI applications as a substitute for old-fashioned, feet-on-the-street, hard-news reporting. Put another way, FOI can be used as an excuse for public officials, and a crutch for the media.
Many FOI requests originate not with the media but from private citizens.
One such request recently led to the revelation of government-issued credit card expenses — a story that dominated the front pages of the Compass last week, and is still evolving. In fact, we don’t know for certain who asked for the information because requestors are allowed to shield their identities, one of several protective measures built into the law. The focus, as it should be, is on what government has been doing with public resources, not “Who wants to know?”
Let’s clarify something: Public officials have no obligation to talk to the Compass or any other news media. They do, however, have an inescapable obligation to share information about the business of government with the Cayman Islands people. The Compass’s role is to provide a conduit for communication and a forum for discussion.
We do want to recognize the exceptional efforts of the Information Commissioner’s Office — now being led by Acting Information Commissioner Jan Liebaers, who helped draft both the FOI and Public Records laws and has been working for greater accountability and transparency from within Cayman government for 17 years.
Having said that, we’d like nothing more than to put Mr. Liebaers and his office out of business.
There should be little demand in Cayman for an objective arbiter to help members of the public gain access to information that is already theirs.
The government’s default position should be to share all records when practical, without needing to be asked, or forced, and certainly without dragging the information commissioner into the fray unless there is a real question of law to be determined.
In an ideal society, an FOI Law would only need to be a single paragraph, led by a clear declarative — “All records of government business belong to the public” — followed by a short list of exemptions, the reasons for which are obvious — individual human resources matters, national security issues, commercially sensitive information from the private sector, etc. Indeed, we believe that’s a fair summation of the spirit of Cayman’s far lengthier law.
However, our government often uses the letter of the FOI Law to thwart its spirit, employing an arsenal of redactional artifice and deadline gamesmanship in order to hand over as little information as possible, with as little context as possible, and as slowly as possible.
If they could get away with it, we suspect many government officials would reveal no information at all, certainly nothing that might reflect poorly upon themselves or their allies.
That’s why our open records laws are necessary. At their core, they are a bridge between a government that too often doesn’t want to tell and a constituency that too often doesn’t want to know.
We’re glad the laws are in place. But we’re sorry they have to be.
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This editorial is an interesting take on the relationship between the public sector and the media.
Whilst I do not entirely disagree with the sentiments, this sentence – Public officials have no obligation to talk to the Compass or any other news media is a bit worrying and I suspect it will turn round and bite whoever wrote it.
In my Net News days I experienced an attitude within CIG that broadly boiled down a belief that by not responding to media enquiries MLAs and civil servants, some of them at very high levels, could prevent stories appearing. People even put the phone down on me thinking it would kill a story. In fact it was quite effective until, in early 2007, the old editorial policy of requiring an official quote of some kind to balance stories was dropped. After that if we failed to get a response we ran with what we had. Needless to say there were more than a few complaints about that, which in general we ignored, and it sounds like nothing much has changed.
Over here I worked in a public sector press office (and this was long before FOI and the internet) until the local newspaper poached me so have seen both sides.
In the UK, public sector managers over a certain pay grade were required to work with the media, either directly or through the press office. They did not have the option of ignoring media enquiries, if they tried to do that one of our press officers would take it up so we always impressed on our heads of department that messing around with the media was counter-productive.
The main reason for this is that journalists have both official and unofficial sources and are entitled to use either or both. They also work to deadlines so non-cooperation often simply means if you fail to get back to them they will run with whatever they have at the time. But the most important reason for working with the media is that the instant you start stonewalling they smell a cover up. I like to think we did a good job and it certainly made working for the press easier when I left the public sector.
In comparison it seems to me that what CIG, RCIPS, the Governor’s office and many other public sector bodies in the Cayman Islands lack is simply a coherent media relations policy and I am certain that the reason for that is a complete lack of understanding of the role of the media in modern society. Probably the answer to this editorial is the introduction of something like Media Relations 101 into all public sector entities.