Published Wednesday, April 4, 2001
Personal privacy trumps public access
BY MARY VUONG
ASNE Reporter
Although Americans overwhelmingly support the public’s right to government records, many are willing to sacrifice some of that freedom to keep their “personal privacy,” according to a poll released Wednesday by the First Amendment Center and ASNE.
Access to public records is important to more than 90 percent of the 1,005 adults surveyed. Six in 10 consider access to these records “crucial to the functioning of good government.”
But 61 percent are “very concerned” about personal privacy, and 54 percent support strengthening privacy laws, even if it means limiting the public’s access to government records.
Slightly more of those surveyed – 56 percent – support reducing journalists’ access to public records if such a move protects their privacy.
“Americans tend to be supportive of access to government records, but they get very nervous if they think some of those records may include their names,” said Ken Paulson, executive director of the First Amendment Center, a Freedom Forum affiliate working to protect the First Amendment.
For example, many Americans want access to criminal convictions, police reports, public officials’ salaries and real estate records, but they are less happy about public access to divorce records, drivers licenses and voter registrations, according to “Freedom of Information in the Digital Age,” report released recently by the First Amendment Center and the ASNE Freedom of Information Committee. The survey was part of the report.
The autopsy photographs of race car driver Dale Earnhardt are a “striking example of how respect for celebrity, disrespect for news media and creeping concern about personal privacy can form a potent combination that literally rewrites the law,” Mr. Paulson said.
When the Orlando Sentinel recently requested the photos to use for story research – but not for publication – a judge granted an injunction that gave the state Legislature and the governor time to pass a law that makes it a felony to obtain or display autopsy photos without a judge’s permission.
The First Amendment Center's survey, conducted in November over the telephone, has a sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points. It is part of a two-year ASNE effort to study how to strengthen and expand freedom of information in the digital era, said Anders Gyllenhaal, executive editor of The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee.
“We are devoted to coming up with strategies for how to extend and expand openness,” Mr. Gyllenhaal said. That includes looking at how the government regulates information, how newspapers handle the restrictions, and how technology – including databases, search engines and electronic records – changes access to information.
Mr. Gyllenhaal said he was encouraged by findings in the survey that showed that people have an understanding and appreciation for the openness of records and government meetings and that they recognize the dangers of government secrecy.
Yet neither he nor Mr. Paulson was surprised by public attitudes toward the press’s access to governmental records that could disclose more personal information.
The survey also found that nearly 38 percent of people became “more concerned” about their privacy once they accessed the Internet. Still, 59 percent said the benefits of the Internet outweigh their concerns about privacy.
“Unfortunately, (the public) doesn’t see the big picture, the need to protect freedom of expression for everybody,” said Robert D. Richards, co-director of the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment at Pennsylvania State University. “If we chip away at individual rights, there is the potential to lose them forever.
Mr. Richards, who is attending the ASNE convention, said the public too frequently lumps all media together, and the challenge is for serious news organizations to distinguish themselves from the print and broadcast tabloids.
Almost every day, the public benefits from the media’s ability to gather news from open records and meetings, Mr. Gyllenhaal said. If reporters weren’t at public meetings, very few people would know what had happened. And almost every Pulitzer-Prize-winning story about the public arena in this decade could not have been written, he said.
The problem, Mr. Paulson said, is “if the public doesn’t trust the press, they’re not going to see any benefit in maintaining strong public records law.”
