LEAHY

WASHINGTON — The struggle against government secrecy is a good-news, bad-news proposition, according to an update by one of the nation’s top news executives, who reported that part of the problem is journalism’s failure to show ordinary citizens how they benefit from free access to information.

“We’re not going to win an election anytime, anywhere, anyplace,” Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley told a group of journalists and open-government advocates last week at the National Press Club. Referring to the unpopularity of the news media, Curley said his business must do a better job of connecting its work to the public interest.

Curley also criticized the Bush administration for what he characterized as excessive efforts to withhold information and called upon journalists to question the 2008 presidential candidates about how they would handle open-government issues if elected.

“Secrecy is one of the handiest tools for government that wants to be accountable only to itself regardless of the spirit of any law,” Curley said in a speech assessing the support that the news business has won from Congress and the Bush administration in making it easier for the public to scrutinize the work of its government. The address was one of the main events of Sunshine Week, part of an open-government campaign launched in 2005 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Notwithstanding the setbacks, there have been some unexpected victories lately for the cause of access to official records, Curley said. He noted, for example, that President Bush recently signed an update of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that strengthens some of its provisions guaranteeing public access to official records. For example, the new FOIA creates an ombudsman to referee disputes over access, as an alternative to lawsuits.

Curley also noted movement in both houses of Congress toward enactment of a federal “shield law” — legislation intended to help reporters protect the anonymity of certain news sources.

Curley suggested, however, that progress toward openness in government is grudging. He cited a little-noticed Bush administration budget proposal that he portrayed as undercutting the new FOIA that the president recently signed into law. The proposal would put the new FOIA ombudsman under the aegis of the Justice Department.

The AP has quoted such open-access advocates as Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., as viewing the proposal as a potential conflict of interest. Their reasoning is that the Justice Department is the agency charged with defending an administration’s efforts to withhold records. Curley called the proposal a “sucker punch.”

Curley also recounted the travails of an AP photographer imprisoned in Iraq on what he depicted as dubious grounds — a case with “damaging fallout,” he said, that is “far more serious than the detention of one more Iraqi.” Photographer Bilal Hussein spent 19 months in prison before his case went to the Iraqi court system last year.

According to the AP, Pentagon spokesmen have alleged that Hussein was suspected in a range of terrorist-related activities. Curley said the U.S. military should release information to explain the detention of Hussein. He also suggested that the restrictions on news photography in the war zone have had the ironic effect of depriving the public of images that could help tell the story of the progress in Iraq over the past year.

“By removing all the photographers in Anbar Province, there was no one there to document ‘the good news’ that resulted from the surge, including the everyday activities of citizens living normally,” Curley said.

If such restrictions had been imposed during World War II, Curley said, the historic photo of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima would never have been shot.

“I don’t know how many people are interested in one more Iraqi,” Curley said in reference to the Bilal Hussein case, but he expressed the wish that the public was more attentive to the case and its implications.

To illustrate the need for a federal reporter shield law, Curley cited the example of Toni Loci, a former USA Today reporter recently ordered by a federal judge to pay up to $5,000 a day in fines for her refusal to identify anonymous news sources in the Justice Department. The court action stems from the case of a onetime military scientist investigated in connection with the 2001 anthrax attacks.

In part, because of aggressive lobbying to prevent such situations, “a pretty decent reporter privilege bill” has now passed the full House and a key committee in the Senate, Curley said. “Three years back the conventional wisdom was that a national shield bill for journalists would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill and wasn’t even worth introducing,” Curley said.

He credited the decision of news organizations — and their allies in the pursuit of open government — to mount a permanent effort across many fronts to maintain a free flow of official information.

Curley said these organizations can celebrate the fact that “we are finally developing the muscles, the moves and the marathon mentality to hold up our own side of the perpetual contest between sunshine and secrecy.”

Curley called upon journalists to insist that presidential candidates declare where they stand on a controversial Bush administration policy, ordered by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that tended to move federal agencies toward greater secrecy.

“We need to ask the candidates — at every opportunity until we have a clear answer — whether they are willing to appoint an attorney general willing to follow the spirit as well as the letter of the law that protects the people’s right to know what their government is doing,” said Curley.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com