Internet revolution is forcing government, media transparency
By Mark Tapscott

The Heritage Foundation (KRT) Debates about "red states" and "blue
states" aside, the 2004 presidential campaign made one thing clear:
The Internet is rapidly establishing real-time transparency in
government and the media as the sine qua non of American public
policy.

That's good news for the American voter, because for the most part
government and the major media remain for now much as they have been
for the past half-century - too remote, restrictive and elitist.

Revolutions aren't won in a day and sometimes progress is slow, so
friends of openness in government can take heart knowing they're on
the winning side. Here are three reasons why their victory is
inevitable:

First, the Blogosphere has ended Big Media's monopoly on deciding what
is news and how it should be covered. A relative handful of
influential editors and producers at media outlets such as The New
York Times and CBS News no longer shape the national agenda.

Consider those exploding cigars of Dan Rather's National Guard memos
and the Times' "lost munitions" story. Within hours of Rather's Guard
memos broadcast, Powerlineblog.com, LittleGreenFootballs.com and other
bloggers exposed the memos as fakes. Within a week, Rather's story was
a major embarrassment for the once-respected Tiffany Network.

The process was repeated with the Times story that suggested
terrorists stole 380 tons of a powerful explosive from Saddam
Hussein's al-Qaqaa munitions depot because Bush failed to guard it
properly during the U.S. military's drive to Baghdad. As with the
Rather National Guard memos, within hours bloggers such as
FroggyRuminations.com and TruthLaidBear.com exposed huge holes in the
lost munitions story. The bloggers charged the Times with inexcusably
sloppy research and with excluding key details indicating the
munitions were gone long before the first U.S. troops arrived at
al-Qaqaa.

These episodes demonstrate San Jose Mercury News technology columnist
Dan Gillmor's maxim that people reading the news collectively often
know more about a topic than the journalists reporting it. No media
organization's research staff can match the collective fact-checking
power and speed of bloggers. Thus, Big Media is on notice: Report it
straight or risk public humiliation.

The second reason victory is inevitable concerns public officials.
Bloggers forcing more media transparency today can force more
transparency in government tomorrow, from the most obscure bureaucracy
to the White House. It will be tougher to bring about in government
because the light of accountability is anathema to so many bureaucrats
and office-holders. But happen it will.

Finally, the Internet is sparking an explosion of publicly available
data from government at all levels and putting it in the hands of
millions of citizens, journalists, political and community activists,
academics and think-tank experts with the skills to make sense of the
numbers.

Government officials can no longer control the means of measuring the
success or failure of public policies. For example, perhaps you are
skeptical of claims taxes must be increased so more can be spent on
local schools. Find out how much is really being spent and where those
tax dollars come from on the U.S. Census Bureau's Public
Elementary-Secondary Education Finance Data Web site at
http://www.census.gov/govs/www/school.html.

Or maybe you want to know how many problems health inspectors found in
a facility you're considering for your elderly parent. Go to the
Department of Health and Human Services web site at
http://www.medicare.gov/NHCompare. Like Agent Mulder's truth that is
"out there," data on virtually every topic imaginable is becoming
available at little or no cost.

Millions of people across America know how to access and analyze such
data, thanks to the availability of software programs such as
Microsoft Excel. As public awareness of the utility and accessibility
of such data grows, so will the demand for more access and more data.
Pressure on government to put more of its internal processes on the
Internet will grow.

A logical starting place is the federal government's Past Performance
Information Retrieval System (PPIRS), which contains millions of
internal reports on the performance of thousands of government
contractors. How long before vast networks of Internet-savvy citizen
analysts apply the same immense fact-checking power to pork-laden
government programs as the emerging Blogosphere is now doing with Big
Media? Then the Freedom of Information Act will have real muscle. --

- ABOUT THE WRITER Mark Tapscott is director of the Center for Media
and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Readers may write to the
author in care of The Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue
NE, Washington, D.C. 20002; Web site: www.heritage.org. Information
about Heritage's funding may be received by writing to the foundation
and requesting it.

This essay is available to Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
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necessarily represent the views of Knight Ridder/Tribune or its
editors. --- (c) 2004, The Heritage Foundation Distributed by Knight
Ridder/Tribune Information Services