The October 1996 issue of the The American Editor includes an article based on George Kennedy's doctoral dissertation, "Advocates of Openness: The Freedom of Information Movement." Kennedy writes:

"The editors who led the freedom of information movement were, for the most part, also leaders of ASNE. The pioneers were Basil ‘Stuffy' Walters of the Chicago Daily News, James Pope of the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal and J. Russell Wiggins of the Washington Post, the first three chairmen of ASNE's Committee on Freedom of information."

And so when I found Walters' name missing from the list of inductees into the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame, I muttered: How can this be?

In her book on ASNE's first 50 years, ("Read All About It!") Alice Fox Pitts reported that in 1945 ASNE sent a three-man committee around the world to promote the free flow of news across national borders. Pitts wrote: "It was not long before ASNE discovered that barriers to information existed not only along frontiers, but within the United States as well. In a report to the 1949 ASNE conventio, Basil L. Walters, chairman of ASNE's Committee on World Freedom of Information, pointed out this fundamental fact in a statement that has since become a classic. ... It was at this point that ASNE committed itself to the home-front battle for FoI."

Space does not allow me to cite examples of Walters' crucial efforts in the fight for freedom of information.

In 1954, the University of Arizona established the John Peter Zenger Award. The first recipient was the Denver Post's Palmer Hoyt. The second recipient was Basil Walters, followed by James Pope and J. Russell Wiggins.

When Walters accepted the award, he said: "I have erroneously been credited with being the (ASNE) chairman of the first Freedom of Information Committee. The first ‘chairman,' of course, was John Peter Zenger."

Now, incredibly, Walters has been erroneously forgotten for induction into the FOIA Hall of Fame.

Shame on somebody.

Raymond Moscowitz

Peru, Ind.

ASNE President Robert H. Giles responds:

The standards for election to the FOIA Hall of Fame included leadership in getting the original act passed in 1966, in amending the act in 1974, in the current effort to pass an electronic version of FOIA and in the hard day-to-day, year-to-year work of ensuring access to federal government information.

We cast a wide net among news industry organizations in search of candidates for the Hall of Fame. We recognized that many, many individuals have made significant contributions to the freedom of information movement over the years. We could not include all of them in the first group of inductees, so we chose to focus on those most responsible for the federal act and its implementation.

In our list of major contributors to FOIA, Stuffy Walters' name did not emerge. He appears to be an early, important activist for freedom of information whose leadership in ASNE took place several years before the society began its effort to encourage the enactment of a federal freedom of information act.

Clearly other individuals deserve to be recognized for carrying on the fight for open government. We hope that, over time, their names will be added to the original 24 in the Hall of Fame.