Bill Kovach, a newspaper journalist for thirty years, is curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. This is his speech delivered to the Massachusetts Press Association Awards Banquet on June 5, 1997.

Any discussion of the free flow of information must acknowledge at least two problems journalists have generated themselves. The first results from economic considerations - corporate closures, downsizing, job insecurity, trivia worship - which have diluted and diminished the flow of useful information. The second, from a careless misuse of technology. Several years ago, a State Department official named Fukiyama was widely ridiculed when he spoke of the end of the cold war as the "end of history." But a consumer of news today might wonder if, so far as many journalists are concerned, he wasn't right. History may not have ended with the-cold war, but it certainly has disappeared from much news reporting. A couple of months ago, for example, there was a story of charges of improper campaign contributions in the contest between Ron Carey and James P. Hoffa for the presidency of the Teamster's Union. According to one national news organization, these charges earned the election the honor of "the most bitterly contested in union history." The most bitterly contested? My God. This is the union that 30 years ago dispatched professional bombers to Tennessee to literally blow the opposition away with sticks of dynamite. Too many reporters today seem to take the old newspaper motto, "Each day the world is born anew" literally. It truly is the end of history when editors and reporters--like the ones who produces that Teamsters report--are more concerned with making their stories sound compelling with titillating phrases pulled from vacant minds rather than putting in the information literally at their fingertips to provide meaningful context. Reporting on the new technology itself seems especially vulnerable to this historically barren reporting. Technology writer Denise Caruso in a recent speech talked about 10 things that make her cranky. Number one on her list is what she calls the "infinite loopiness of the hype machine" - a sophisticated version of the kind of Ponzi scheme which obliterated Albania's struggling democracy recently. This one is a powerful alliance of new technology entrepreneurs who are looking for money, venture capitalists who see another chance for quick profit, and the journalists whose jobs depend on the continued growth of the industry. It is, Caruso says, journalism devoid of any memory -any history. As early as 1984, these journalists annually declared that year "The Year of Interactive Television. " Well, it's 1997, and we are still waiting for the dawning of the year of interactive television. The point is, no matter how many times the hype turns out to be wrong, the story catches a whole new string of writers and, like a rusty fishhook, seems to hold on to the old ones forever. The track record - the history - of the story seldom intrudes to caution readers at the next trade fair. Maybe Albania's problem was that their press was not sophisticated enough to keep promising that something anything pay off. Another example was a conversation I had recently at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard with two people who held important jobs in the Republican party. When the conversation tumed to welfare reform and I expressed some misgivings about the return of the basic welfare programs to state control, one of the women became angry. "Don't you think the states can do a better job than the federal government has?" she asked. "Maybe, " I said, "but I remember when the states ran welfare programs. That's when a major piece of the welfare program of the state of Alabama was buying bus tickets to New York for their black citizens to--as George Wallace said - let those Yankees up there who love them so much take care of them. " Both of my companions were surprised. They had never heard such a thing. Now, these are talented, capable people who diligently followed the daily news. They had a complete grasp of last-minute details, statistics, and anecdotes about current political debate. But neither their political discourse nor their daily news diet included this context, this history. Like so many stories today, the coverage of the issue too often dealt only with the new world aborning. Why does this happen when all this history is literally at the reporter's fingertips?? Obviously, there are a lot of reasons. There is the faddish focus on the new and on celebrity, both of which are allergic to history, and which squeeze issue pieces where history used to reside completely off of the page. There are the obvious results of downsizing--too little staff, too little time to invest in reporting stories. There is the reduction of space and editing time devoted to the presentation of the news. And there is the unthinking misuse of technology. Just as the matador's cape distracts the bull from the serious business of the moment, the presence of the powerful new technology in the newsroom seems to distract journalists from reporting. A few weeks ago, I visited the newsroom where I began my career nearly 40 years ago. It's a small-town newspaper in which local public occurrences are the big news of the day. My conversation with the editor was interrupted by the wail of sirens - several sirens - passing just outside the building. Everyone in the newsroom seemed oblivious to the sounds. The editor noticed my concern and said, "I know, we used to jump on those sirens every time. But we can count on the people at the fire hall to put out something soon on the computer. They'll tell us what's happening." I couldn't help recalling the line from Russell Baker's memoirs: only a fool expects a public official to tell him what the news is. But in news organizations across the country reporters routinely rummage around in the electronic flea market of information snatching up bargain bytes which, as often a not, are public relations handouts, self-serving market tips, or other self-seeking, self-serving trash. (Recent figures indicate there are 20,000 more public relations agents than journalists.) This pattem of misuse and abuse of the power at our fingertips makes me a little hesitant to complain how others use the technology to frustrate the work of journalism. A little hesitant, but not a lot. There are still many reporters and editors who care desperately about the public service aspects of their work. And there are certainly millions of citizens whose ability to actively and effectively take part in their own governance makes the subject too important to overlook. Even in my darkest moments, I still believe that the new market forces distorting press beh~vior will eventually discover the true value of thoughtful, quality journalism and give birth to a renaissance. Anticipating that day, it is more important than ever that we protect the public's right to access to quality inforrnation, as you are with your campaigns on behalf of the public's right to know. But your efforts to keep open the channels of public affairs information are being crippled every day by the rush of government agencies to privatize public programs and public information. It is another example of creative minds learning to use technology to substitute private interest for public welfare. A new world of private control of public interests is emerging as government services are privatized. At the same time, a press which sharpened its skills in the public sector is too slowly adapting to the change. There is little movement by journalists to equip themselves for a watchdog role in this new world of private administration of public business. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, I wrote about exclusive rights to distribute and sell the electronic versioh of the state's public laws that would effectively deny public access to the electronic database; how the National Technical Information Service granted exclusive rights to private companies to sell once-public government data including that gathered about licenses issued by the Federal Communications Comrnission about the privatization of prisons and welfare programs. The press and the public are being inexorably blinded of the behaviors of institutions which wield power over their lives as systems of public welfare and interest disappear behind corporate insistence on rights of privacy and libel. After that column appeared, I heard from journalists and lawyers all over the country concerned about the trend. What they added to the story was no surprise - the situation is worse than I reported. I learned, for example, that the United States Postal Service change of address database has been made private; the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Department gun dealership data has been made private; National Institutes of Health cause of death records are private; Social Security Administration death records are private. All of this data was gathered for public purpose by public agencies with public money. Until recently, this information had been freely available to teachers, researchers, journalists, all working to expand public knowledge of public issues and the workings of their public institutions. Now they are converted into private pools of profit. With the federal government leading the way, it didn't take long for local government to catch on to the new scam. Cleveland, Ohio privatized the development of the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Although built largely with public funds, records of its board meetings are private. The University of Cincinnati Hospital--the public hospital which handles most of the city's indigent and AIDS cases--has started a public squeeze play to force a decision to either privatize their records or privatize their entire operation by warning they can't compete with the new private ho~pitals because their records have to be made public. Even where federal law tries to honestly monitor performance, state governments hide behind private contractors. The Older Americans Act, for example, created a national network of long-term care ombudsmen to investigate and expose neglect or abuse. However, just across the line in Connecticut, ombudsman Barbara Frank tried to warn that cost-cutting efforts threatened nursing home residents only to be told that her opinion was "contrary" to that of the Governor and was not to be put in any public report. The Iowa ombudsman tried to criticize the managers of state nursing homes and was stripped of his right to issue public reports and warned to "stay in line and not make trouble for them." New Mexico's ombudsman, Tim Covell, was ordered not to even mail a letter to a nursing home director who failed to act against sub-standard conditions reported three years ago. His director told him she was afraid she would lose her job if he did so. In every case, the state officials told George Rodrigue (Nieman Fellow 1990), who reported these incidents for the Dallas Morning News that they were only trying to make sure everyone was "on the same team." That team now includes not only the executive and legislative branches of government who make contracts but the private companies who provide public services whose obligation to both the state and their stockholders is to save money--not the citizens who are placed in their care. You all remember the effort by the business community here to further erode the public right to inforrnation this year when the State Department of Economic Development supported legislation to limit public access to the Department's documents, arguing the need of business to protect its information from competitors. The proposed legislation would even limit access by members of the legislature. It was Representative Marie Parente who spoke for a lot of us when she denounced private vendors who routinely tell inquiring state officials, "Mind your own business. We're private." As you know, on the state and local levels, neither the Federal FOIA nor most state public records statutes explicitly allow access to the records of private entities performing government functions. As the guidebook to the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts makes clear, "The FOIA does not apply to private companies, persons who receive federal contracts or grants, taxexempt orgariizations or state and local governments." Even where state action has seemed successful in keeping public information public, the statues are undermined by judicial process. A recent study of state public records practices reports that in virtually all state statutes, a "public agency" or "public body" is defined solely in terms of public entities. In Florida, where the law seemed to clearly make the records of entities acting "on behalf of any public agency" open to the public, the state courts have tended to apply a "traditional government function" test, and by so doing, have reduced the flow of information to a trickle. Today, a private orgmization in Florida is considered to be "acting on behalf of' a public agency only if it can pass a number of tests which include findings that: The public agency played a part in creating the private entity; The public agency provides substantial funds to the entity; The public agency regulates its activities and judgements; And, the private agency plays an integral part in the public agency's decisions. All of which effectively cloud most records that by law are supposed to be open. Finally, when government agencies don't privatize public information for profit, they censor. Recently, the California Environmental Protection Agency ordered all of its offices to search out and destroy all research data and internal records that differ from final decisions made by EPA administrators. So far as the EPA of California is concerned, it is a matter of policy that there is no longer any history. The order was defended for lack of storage space. At the same time the Congressional Research Service has decided there is no present either. At least, no present for public consumption. It has ordered discontinuation of a weekly summary of fishery and marine mammal information which was being made available to professional environmentalists as part of a peer review process. The information-sharing was stopped because members of congress complained that the services of the CRS were to serve their needs and weren't meant to be shared with the public. And the list goes on. But I have to close with some good news. One anecdote in my article dealt specifically with problems reporters in Texas were having monitoring the work of newly-privatized jails and prisons. That alerted editors in Texas who went to work on the problem with an editorial campaign pushing for a Texas law to protect public access to privatized activities of govemment. Jane Kirtley, Executive Director of the Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press became involved and recently reported that Lt. Govemor Bob Bullock, who, as Speaker of the Texas State Senate has more power over legislation than the Governor, has publicly committed to dra~ and support legislation to keep open govemment principles in place over privatized govemment functions. On July 1st, 6,000 joumalists from around the world will gather in Hong Kong to watch that community pass behind the veil of Chinese government secrecy, censorship and press control. Meanwhile, back here at home, 100 times that many journalists seem to be unaware that an equally impenetrable curtain is closing between them and the institutions of power they are obliged to monitor. It is past time for journalists here to band together in a national campaign to resist the privatization movement and keep public information flowing openly and freely.

Kovach was editor of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution from 1986 to 1988.

Prior to becoming editor in Atlanta, he had a distinguished career with The New York Times as an editor and reporter. From 1978 to 1986, he served as chief of The Times' Washington bureau. Before joining The Times Kovach was a reporter for six years with the (Nashville) Tennessean where he covered Appalachian poverty, the civil rights movement and southern politics. He began his career at the Johnson City (TN) Press-Chronicle.