I'm Michael Schudson, I teach at Columbia Journalism School, I'm a professor there
in the PHD program and the master's programs and I'm a historian in
sociology of American politics and media and I've just published a book called
"The Rise of the Right to Know: politics and the culture of transparency 1945-1975."
The concept of right to know since it came to be part of our language in the 50s
and 60s has transformed a great deal in American society
with respect to government where the term is used most frequently it has made
government information more accessible to the press more accessible to the
public and I should add it makes executive government information more
accessible to the Congress itself much more broadly it changed how people think
about their lives in America it's changed how doctors talk to or don't
talk to their patients it was common practice with with a patient who had a
serious probably fatal illness for the doctor not to tell them that
and there's stunning evidence of this in some surveys done and one in 1961 that
found that 12% of doctors treating cancer patients mentioned to the patient
that they had cancer and by 1979 the survey was repeated and it was 98
percent of doctors and the this this changed aspects of medical research
where subjects of medical research had to be informed informed consent to
participate in the research especially if there was something that
might damage them or affect their health adversely campaign finance disclosure
came in in the 1970s and people would share much more than they had before
about again aspects of their own lives that had been private when Betty
Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1974 she spoke about that publicly
and she spoke about her mastectomy publicly and this was shocking to people
in 1974 but but she became something of a national heroine as a result.
The Right to Know is is a not technically a legal right,
that is, it's not protected by the Constitution. It is in some specific
instances it's protected by legislation so if you want information from the
government and you file a Freedom of Information Act request because it's not
you can't find it on the department's website or anywhere else and phone calls
don't work so you file a FOIA as it's called request and the government is
obliged by law to respond to you within so many days if they respond and they
say we're not going to share it that information because it they have to
specify it for all - under exemption so-and-so you can say well so they tell me
but they're wrong and I'm gonna sue for this information and then you can take
them to court under the Freedom of Information Act and you may win and you
may lose but more than a few times you will win
looking ahead with the internet can we imagine a case where we're going to cut
back on all this information sharing can we can we put the genie back in the
bottle. Not entirely, no I don't think we can and we have to learn to adapt to a
wildly new environment. There are a lot of these dilemmas that are going to keep
arising as we take it for granted that information is supposed to be public as
a first principle I think yes public information should be public but
in practice it gets vastly more complicated in that