On Thursday, the Daley administration made headlines by announcing
that the City of Chicago plans to post all Freedom of Information Act
requests to its website. The mayor sold the idea as a good government
reform, telling the City Hall press corps that "if you want transparency in government, you have to have this."
Investigative journalists aren't convinced. As the Chicago News Cooperative's Dan Mihalopoulos wrote yesterday,
when FOIA inquiries are made public, both journalistic rivals and
administration officials will get to see what stories reporters are
chasing. Plus, the city will not be required to publish their responses
to the requests, keeping hidden the arbitrary justifications the city
often offers reporters when it refuses to release internal information.
During the "Reporter's Notebook" segment on Fox Chicago Sunday
yesterday, Dane Placko offered some suggestions of additional measures
the Daley administration could implement if it was serious about
transparency. Watch it:
Thanks to the Associated Press, folks in Atlanta and Los Angeles will
get to read tonight about Illinois' budget woes. This afternoon, the
national news agency devoted a story
to the state's backlog of unpaid bills, which will grow to $6 billion by
the end of the fiscal year. "The situation, for us, has been almost
normalized, and that's the
scary part," said Ron Howell of the Quincy-based substance-abuse
treatment center Recovery Resources. "If I'm not screaming on the edge
of
self-destruction, it's because this has numbed us."
