Fill all the shadowlands with public access sunshine

The export-import trade in First Amendment freedom thrives as an issue, not a sure thing.
Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, went a little beyond his Middle America territory. Al got press and governments in Zambia and Botswana debating the merit of public access to government records.
Funny thing: The Anniston, Ala. schools reporter lamented to me at the same time how handicapped she is by the board of education she covers. Superintendent and elected school officials won't let her see the documents they are working from until after they vote on an issue.
She is unable to alert her online and print audience of the problems under discussion until it's too late.
Her state enacted one of the earliest and best -- on paper -- open records and open meeting laws. She has a supporting attorney general's opinion  to wave under the noses of the poobahs of old-school think. Yet the free press values Al Cross promoted in Africa constantly need tending right here all the time, as the education reporter re-discovered.
Maybe Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of expression, as the Bill of Rights states, but local high-pockets work all the time to stymie reporters.
Yes, it's much worse abroad.
As a Fulbright Professor at American University in Bulgaria, I taught journalism in Blagoevgrad at a Stalinist building that previously housed the Communist Party, which was founded on that spot.
My eastern European and near-Asian students included Serbs and Croats, Muslims and Christians from throughout the Balkans and beyond not long after the last war just over the Bulgarian border with Macedonia.
Those journalism students would have loved to struggle against our school board problems instead of contending for their lives in that rough neighborhood.
Tell me I was wrong. The message I taught was to make sure it's worth your own life or personal freedom before you perform American-style journalism in the barely post-communist world as we do in the U.S.
National life is much more what Al Cross had in mind.
He's a friend and colleague. I advise his Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. And we worked together at the old Courier-Journal in Louisville, where Al as chief political writer was always causing the sun to shine in on furtive government and politics.
With an election coming up in Zambia, the current University of Kentucky professor picked the ideal time and the ideal message to propose a U.S.-style Freedom of Information Act.
Not that our FOIA is perfect in every instance of execution.
But it's a good starting point for the ruling-party officials and journalists Al addressed as a guest of the Media Institute of Southern Africa-Botswana.
He was denounced as an outsider, of course, by a lieutenant general who also is the official Zambia spokesperson. That was so expectable as to be ho-hum.
I say there is no "outside" where liberty is concerned.
And Al's message was supported publicly by a leader of the Press Council of Botswana. The gentleman got his point that everyone stands to gain from open records -- not just reporters.
People generally and mistakenly believe press freedom exists only to benefit not average citizens but the relatively few who make their living in media.
Al seems to have spoken over the heads of journalists and public officials to the African public: Plain folk are the ones who always benefit from openness.
That was the whole point of the Alabama education reporter who merely wanted to tell her audience what's going on with the schools they finance for the elected but clandestine school board to run.
Al Cross is a former president of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is quite right to call on American journalists to promote the role of news media in  democratic -- and I would add "other" -- societies.
I merely stop short of sending reporters to pointless deaths, Al.
But I am proud to be a part of the freedom export business.
Now, let's talk about importing the value of press access to shadowlands such as the local school board.