This week is Sunshine Week, which was established by news industry leaders 18 years ago to promote open government and call attention to the importance of freedom of information in a healthy democracy.

The timing coincides with the March 16 birthday of our fourth president, James Madison, the chief architect of the First Amendment, which guarantees some of our most precious freedoms: religion, speech and freedom of the press.

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both,” Madison wrote. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Madison was talking about public education, but his words resonate deeply with journalists today as we struggle against political, cultural and market forces to provide the public with the power that knowledge gives.

A critical tool in that struggle is the Freedom of Information Act, which, in that Madisonian spirit, guarantees citizens access to the information they need to make informed decisions.

President Lyndon Johnson had to be dragged “kicking and screaming” to the Freedom of Information Act signing ceremony. He “hated the thought of reporters rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the government version of reality,” according to his press secretary, Bill Moyers, who went on to become one of America’s most trusted journalists.

Nevertheless, Johnson signed the act on July 4, 1966, saying it “springs from one of our most essential principles: A democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the Nation permits.”

But too many public servants don’t get it. They simply don’t trust the public with the information required to make good decisions about their government.

Even here in Sonoma County.

On Feb. 11, while reporting a story on how the Sheriff’s Office paid $1.35 million of your tax dollars to settle a brutality claim by a man who was maimed by a deputy’s police dog in 2020, Press Democrat reporter Jeremy Hay learned that the victim had been pulled over two days earlier by a deputy in what was described as a tense encounter.

Hay reached out to the Sheriff’s Office for comment, but the public relations staff do not work on weekends. Efforts to reach Sonoma County spokesman Paul Gullixson, a former journalist, were also unsuccessful.

Hay had enough to proceed with a story on the settlement because he had an official court record, which verified it was true. He held off writing about the traffic stop, however, because he had no official report, and the people who could provide it were radio silent.

Hay handed the story off to county government reporter Emma Murphy, who began placing calls to members of the Sheriff’s PR team on Feb. 13. Deputy Rob Dillion replied that because it was a holiday, no one was on duty. He agreed the allegations were serious, but said Sheriff Eddie Engram was a “busy man” and was unavailable for an interview.

Meanwhile, reporter Colin Atagi put in a formal request for access to body-worn camera footage and dispatch audio from the stop. There is nothing in the California Public Records Act, the state version of the Freedom of Information Act, that prevents them from releasing the body camera footage.

On Feb. 14,

as we prepared to publish, Murphy received a call from another sheriff’s spokesperson, intimating that there was more to the story and offering to let her view the body-worn camera footage, but only “off the record.”

The term has a very specific meaning to journalists and public officials: Murphy could not write about what she saw in the video or refer to it in any way in her story.

To be sure, journalists do enter off-the-record arrangements, invariably because the information is not available any other way. And we follow strict ethical and professional guidelines before entering into those agreements.

(We follow the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, which you can find at SPJ.org.)

We held the story another day. Dillion again offered to allow us to view the videoon an off-the-record basis.

Murphy, deputy investigations editor Brett Wilkison and I spent 17 minutes on the phone with Dillion, trying to understand why he would insist we view the video but not report what it shows. If he had evidence that helped the sheriff look good, why not show the whole world?