The Cherokee Scout in Murphy, N.C., did not do the open-government movement any favors this week.

As Jim Romenesko reported, the paper issued an apology for filing a records request with Cherokee County Sheriff Keith Lovin for a list of concealed-carry permit holders in the county, as well as the application. The paper indicated in a letter to readers that it was looking into allegations that Lovin was only issuing permits to people he favored. There was no indication that the paper was going to publish all the names it got.

But Lovin refused to grant the request, and posted the paper’s request, as well as his response and his vow to “support the constitution [sic] and all amendments including the Second Amendment on the department’s Facebook page. I will continue to uphold my Oath of Office [sic] and serve the Citizens of Cherokee County.” He obviously forgot that his oath was also uphold the laws of North Carolina, including the open-records law that said the concealed-permit information is a matter of public records.

The sheriff’s posting the information on the department’s Facebook page naturally got the gun-rights crowd fired up (no pun intended), who promptly denounced the paper’s efforts.

Which brings us to the withdrawal of the open-records request, as well as the apology from publisher David Brown and editor Robert Horne, who called the request “a lapse of judgment.”

“As publisher of your local newspaper, I want to apologize to everyone we unintentionally upset with our public records request for a list of those who have or have applied for a concealed carry permit. We had no idea the the reaction it would cause.

“Sheriff Keith Lovin had the best interests of the people of Cherokee County at heart when he denied our request. The Scout would like to offer an apology to him as well.”

Brown also brought out his and Horne’s bona fides as local folks, with Brown even noting he had been baptized there.

The only lapse of judgment was backing down on the request and kissing Lovin’s boots.

This does not help the Scout, or its readers. Rather, Lovin has learned that he can make the local paper back off and print only the news he wants. He’s also learned he can break open-records laws, which he is sworn to uphold, without any fear of repercussion.

And it will embolden others to follow Lovin’s example and bully journalists into sticking with the press releases they are being spoon fed.

Would the paper had faced a backlash if it pursued the case? Probably. But nobody ever said that journalism was a risk-free enterprise, especially when it comes to speaking truth to power.

Elijah Lovejoy could have probably lived a longer, more prosperous life if he had not challenged the institution of slavery. While the abolitionist publisher paid with his life, he also sent a message that killing the messenger doesn’t kill the message.

Likewise, thugs in Arizona thought they could keep their misdeeds secret by killing Don Bolles, but instead their crimes got even greater media scrutiny.

In the spirit of Bolles and the Arizona Project his death inspired, maybe we should all file a records request with Lovin for the concealed-carry permit list, and let him know that he may have silenced one news outlet but true journalists never give up.

Lovin’s contact information can be found here.

Utah’s open-government advocates got something After a year-long fight, the Utah State Legislature has finally released 16,000 pages of documents related to the state’s redistricting efforts.

The decision to release the documents came after the Utah Democratic Party threatened to sue the state for access to the record. Lawmakers refused to turn over the records until a $9,250 bill for compiling the data was paid.

Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act allows fees to be waived if the records request benefits the public. Legislators argued that the Democratic Party’s request failed that test, because they believed it was for a political purposes. But isn’t calling out a Republican-dominated Legislature that drew congressional and legsilative district lines behind closed doors a public benefit?

Lawmakers also said they decided to dump the data online after media outlets filed records requests, which convinced them that there was a public demand for the records.

Click here to see the documents.

Only in Utah, where legislators earned a Black Hole award for attempting to gut the state’s open records law, would a bureaucrat attempt to criminalize talking about a records denial.

The Salt Lake Tribune is challenging the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which operates a bus and train system serving Salt Lake and Utah counties, for holding back crime statistics. The Tribune is seeking data about crimes that have occurred on the transit system as part of an ongoing series about crime trends in Salt Lake County. Fifteen other agencies have complied.

The Tribune reports that the transit authority, in its response to the paper’s appeal to the State Records Committee, not only wants its denial of the request upheld, but it also wants the paper and its reporters sanctioned for allegedly violating Utah Code 76-8-104, which says a person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor “if he threatens any harm to a public servant, party official, or voter with a purpose of influencing his action, decision, opinion, recommendation, nomination, vote or other exercise of discretion.”

The authority claimed that a Tribune reporter threatened to write a negative story if the records were not turned over.

When Tribune columnist Paul Rolly contacted the authority, he was told that it was a misunderstanding, that the attorney who drafted the response to the appeal was reacting emotionally. Rolly was told by transit authority officials that the authority was not alleging criminal conduct by the paper or its journalists.

Rolly said that Tribune reporter Lee Davidson said he never threatened a UTA spokesman with bad press for not providing the records. He told the spokesman that he would have to write that the UTA was not providing the records, Rolly reported.

The records committee, which cannot issue criminal sanctions anyway, will hear the Tribune’s case Thursday.

Remember how everyone was mad as hell and not going to take the Utah State Legislature’s attempt to gut the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act?

After all, these were the people who won SPJ’s first national Black Hole Award.

A blog on The Salt Lake Tribune website reports that the rage pretty much faded away by the 2012 election, when the Entire House of Representatives and part of the Senate were up for re-election.

Out of the 61 representatives who voted for it, 42 were returned to office, and the bill’s sponsor, Rep. John Dougall, won election as the state’s auditor. Dougall ran on a platform of — wait for it — increased government transparency.

In a case that spanned decades, a federal judge has ordered the FBI to pay nearly a half-million in legal fees for holding back documents a journalist requested.

According to the First Amendment Center, Seth Rosenfeld had to file two lawsuits to obtain documents detailing the FBI’s investigation of campus protests at the University of California Berkley in the 1960s. U.S. Judge Edward Chen ruled that the documents should have been released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Rosenfeld has used FBI documents to write articles on the investigations of protestors, and recently published the book Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.

The $470,000 will be paid to the First Amendment Project of Oakland, which represented Rosenfeld.

Without a proper criminal penalty for violating open-government laws, attorney’s fees are the only way to punish agencies that refuse to release information.

The First Amendment Center will consider a challenge to Virginia’s law barring out-of-state residents from requesting public documents.

The federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law, calling it a reasonable restriction.  That contradicted a 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision striking down a similar law in Delaware. The conflicting appellate decision most likely made it easier for the justices to decide they wanted to hear the case.

The case has the potential for striking down such restrictions. Most states recognize that public means everyone, not just the people who call that particular state home.

But, there is also the risk that the high court could uphold Virginia’s law and embolden other states to impose restrictions on who can make records requests.

Linda Petersen, SPJ’s national FOI chairwoman, and Kathryn Foxhall, of the PR Office Censorship blog, co-authored an article in this month’s Quill magazine about the insidious ways public information officers try to steer coverage.

While Kathryn has written extensively on the problem of government PIOs acting more like minders in third-world countries, either monitoring interviews or serving as the choke point through which all information must pass, the article shows it’s not just a Washington beltway phenomena.

Linda tells of the time a public-information officer in a small Utah city told her that, as a “professional courtesy,” one of Linda’s reporters should tell her what stories she was working on.

The article also gives tips for how to get around these roadblocks to information. You may want to share it with your newsrooms.

Have you had any problems with public information officers who see themselves as censors? Leave a comment below.

IRE shares a report from Bloomberg News on how well the Obama Administration has done on the president’s promise for more transparency.

The final grade is “needs improvement.”

To test how responsive the government has been to records requests, Bloomberg reporters submitted FOIA requests to 57 agencies — from the State Department to NASA — asking for the 2011 travel records of top employees.

Nineteen of 20 cabinet-level agencies did not respond within the 20 days required under the federal Freedom of Information Act. Half the agencies produced the data well past the statutory deadlines. The other half have not responded.

As most open-government advocates know, FOIA is not the best tool for getting information out of government in a timely manner. But with Obama’s promise of openness, and his reversing the Ashcroft doctrine of looking for any grounds to deny a request, we were hoping for some improvement.

What has your experience been? And do you find states do a better job than the federal government in releasing public information?

In 2011, Utah journalists and activists beat back one of the worst assaults on the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA). While the Utah State Legislature was forced to withdraw House Bill 477 and pass legislation that would strengthen GRAMA, the spirit of the anti-transparency legislation still lives on in the halls of Utah’s Capitol.

The Salt Lake Tribune and the Utah Democratic Party requested documents pertaining to the state’s recent redistricting efforts. Lawmakers produced the records, first for the Democrats, but have only released one box of documents. The hold up? An almost $10,000 bill for researching and copying the records. While the Democrats paid a previously agreed to price of $5,000 for the work, the Republican-dominated legislature slapped an extra fee on, and only allowed the Democrats to take one box of the state’s choosing, holding the others back until the bill is paid.

The Tribune argued for a fee waiver, arguing that it was seeking the records for public benefit. GRAMA clearly defines journalism as inherently in the public interest, but the Legislature’s own records committee — comprised of legislative leaders — denied the request.

Eric Weeks, a legislative attorney, argued  that “When there is a significant cost to taxpayer funds involved in a request, our policy is to charge a fee for that regardless whether there’s a public interest test or not.” Weeks also argued that the state should not be used as a “free research service” by the news media.

That was one of the arguments supporters of HB477 threw out , proposing that the state not only recoup the time of employees tasked with filling records requests, but covering the employee’s benefits and utility costs for their offices.

Revealing the inner workings of Utah’s redistricting process is clearly in the public interest. The public has a right to know if legislators crafted districts with the intent of protecting incumbents and squeezing out opponents, a process that, in 2000, the Wall Street Journal called one of the most egregious cases of gerrymandering in the nation. Using outrageous fees, especially for documents that were already assembled and researched, could be seen as an attempt to keep the process shrouded in secrecy, further undermining public confidence in the Legislature.

But it also suggests that while lawmakers repealed HB477, they still have not got the message that transparent government is the best government.

An apologetic piece extolling the virtues of WikiLeaks, written by a former New York Times executive editor?

Too good to be true.

As it turns out, it was.

The fake article,  posted online late July 28,  featured an almost wistful Bill Keller saying he was in “the awkward position of having to defend WikiLeaks.”

Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times,  had a rocky relationship with WikiLeaks, further adding to the shock factor of the piece.

The story used quotes pulled from Keller’s emailed responses to Matthew Ingram’s post in defense of WikiLeaks. The webpage was, in The Guardian’s words,  an “immaculate” replication of The New York Times webpage.

This piece came soon after reports that some United States government officials are looking for ways to prosecute journalists who publish leaked secrets.

Ultimately, Keller cleared the air with his July 29, all-caps tweet:

“THERE IS A FAKE OP-ED GOING AROUND UNDER MY NAME, ABOUT WIKILEAKS,” the tweet read. “EMPHASIS ON ‘FAKE.’ AS IN, NOT MINE.”

WikiLeaks later  claimed credit for the op-ed hoax.

A second  tweet from the organization hinted their motivation might have been to embarrass the Times into running something about the financial embargo against the company, according to The Guardian.

In retrospect, a few signs should have tipped off those who tweeted the column.

Not only did Gizmodo report inaccuracies with the missing favicon and inaccurate URL, but the column also contained several typos, Poynter reported.   (More tips on how to spot an internet hoax !)

WikiLeaks’ involvement with the hoax spurred mixed responses.

“Well done,” @LifeInGotham  said.

However, others weren’t so supportive of the prank:

“The people who  hate wikileaks(sic) will use this to cast doubt on the validity of everything you have/will ever leak,” James Gammell (@Destraudo) said.

• See how the episode unraveled
• In the event the fake editorial is pulled offline, here is a pdf:  WikiLeaks a Post Postscript – NYTimes

Poynter

Gizmodo

The Guardian

GigaOM

The Christian Science Monitor

Whitney is the summer Pulliam/Killgore intern with the Society of Professional Journalists. She recently graduated from Brigham Young University after studying journalism. Connect with her via email –  wevans@hq.spj.org –  or on twitter – @whitevs7

*Know something about Freedom of Information that you think we should cover in a blog post? We want to hear from you! Send information to wevans@HQ.SPJ.org. It may be featured in a future post.