Bill Dedman Quotes
I'm pretty much a documents reporter. I'm a public records geek.
Dedman, Bill. Interview. NPR, 2013.
The George W. Bush administration used secrecy and classification to an extreme that few previous administrations ever had in modern times.
The issue under discussion was the fact that the United States Military does not, unlike all civilian courts, maintain a docket of court martials. An interested citizen or a reporter, who usually has a right to attend and observe the proceeding has no way of finding out where and when the proceeding will take place unless the military chooses to inform people or make it public. Courts Martial are legally open to observers except for special circumstances—like civilian criminal trials. However, the military wants as little coverage as possible.
The main reason that the English or American Freedom of Information Act is not used so much by individuals is that the executive agencies make the process of obtaining documents very difficult and then when the government stonewalls, the requestor has to spend a great deal of time and often engage an attorney. The result is that few individuals can spend the time or money and the field consists mostly of media and non profit organizations which have staff and resources.
This is a notable quotation illustrating the state of relations between the press and the government under Theodore Roosevelt. Baker was one of the most muckraking of the investigative reports. And previously there were no accommodations for the press in government agencies. Roosevelt and most of his reformist appointees believed that public opinion was crucial to achieving their political objectives and that transparency would do them much more good than harm. Roosevelt and his colleagues had so much success with the press, that every administration since has made accommodations for the press and tried to use the press to promote their agenda. Most Presidents did not have the thick skin of Theodore Roosevelt who had been disrespected by some of the press since Abraham Lincoln. See {640476} for an example. Most Presidential administrations wanted the good press but also wanted to control the bad.
Bill Dedman (born 1960) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, an investigative reporter for Newsday, and co-author of the biography of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.
