On Access by David Snyder

The decline of proactive litigation by news organizations has had a profound negative effect on the public’s access to information. Anyone who follows the media knows that a seismic shift is underway in the way Americans produce and consume journalism. The financial decline of the legacy media has been exhaustively documented — its causes, effects and larger social import — and the rise of independent, startup and nonprofit media over the same period has been

By DAVID SNYDER—California leaders have scrambled to position themselves at the vanguard of the resistance to President Trump, with Attorney General Xavier Becerra filing some 50 lawsuits against the Trump Administration, including—ironically as we shall see—at least one challenging the president’s failure to release records under federal open-records laws. The state Legislature—more than two-thirds Democratic—passed a “sanctuary state” bill limiting how much state and local law enforcement agencies can cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Not to be

By DAVID SNYDER—California Attorney General Xavier Becerra appears to believe there are two sets of rules about government transparency—one for his office, and another for everyone else.   Back in 2017, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refused to disclose public records about EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s potential ethical conflicts, Becerra promptly sued under the federal Freedom of Information Act, coming down hard on Pruitt. “The EPA is legally required to respond to our FOIA