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.

Enlightened journalism feeds the soul and the body

"You don't go into a bar to get sober," said Larry Werner.
He wasn't just a common sense drinker.
Larry surfed the wave of consumer reporting that rose in the 1960s and 70s at enlightened newspapers. He developed the beat for The Courier-Journal, which in those days never saw a rising tide in journalism it didn't want to crest from its Kentucky seaside of distinguished publishing.
The separation between news and advertising at papers sliced through media waters sharper than fins on a surfboard. So it was only natural to create a reporting beat that actually worked against advertiser interests.
Today's media have made an, ahem, accommodation.
Always true has been that journalism enjoyed all the ethics it could afford. As publishers and broadcasters and Internet entrepreneurs quest for an elusive, new business model for themselves, the balance shifts from consumer interests to commercial interests.
Truth in advertising, truth in labeling, truth in contracts used to create targets for consumer reporters who honed in on abusive practices like sharks on a surfer's toes.
Their movement reversed the old caveat emptor into "let the huckster beware."
The spirit is willing in broadcast, print and online newsrooms. But the flesh is weakened along with all beat reporting. The economy, you know. And the com-revolt. It's remaking reporter-made news into audience participation news.
Still, the cycles of media attention (let's not put them down as mere fads, shall we?) still function to expand the topics of journalism.
Food journalists are the new consumer  reporters. Not recipe writers. Food journalists. Real food. Real journalism.
And the guy at the top of his form is Michael Pollan, author of five books and the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley.
Now, he is a common sense drinker. And eater.
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," is the mantra of Pollan's In Defense of Food, An Eater's Manifesto. (Penguin Books, 2008, ppb., $15).
The way he parses those three ideas in 244 pages creates a stylist's model for journalists in developing their ideas. As in The Omnivore's Dilemma and especially The Botany of Desire, the writer's wit is the sucrose that makes the fiber go down.
And the plain talking trinity of concepts -- true food, not much, mostly plants -- hands everybody a flashlight in the grocery gloom of our plentiful but unhealthful eating habits.
If a package says "nutritional," it probably isn't. If a single serving size could feed a half dozen, let those other six people have it. If processed food is the way you get your veggies, roll your grocery cart over to the produce section or better yet to the local farmers market.
Pollan proves we have industrialized and marketed our food chain until it's wrapped around our obese and diabetic necks.  What we eat in the way we eat and in the amount we eat it is killing us.
You can't say, "Listen to your Mom," Pollan warns, because corporatization of our corporeal-ty goes back so far it sucked the old girl in too.  
Now, I don't know about you, but I'm turned off by the goody-two-shoes admonitions of consumer-ites about "read your insurance contracts" and "mind your peas" and fast food queues.
I don't need baleful finger-wagging or excited arm-waving.
Give me common sense. Pollan does.
He makes my wife's spinach gently braised in olive oil and tossed with mushrooms and chevre with a nice glass of Cabernet on the side go down smoothly because of -- not in spite of -- his scientific reporting.
News organizations rattle their chains, locked into ethical conflicts of interest with grocery ads and cereal commercials and spots for the food web of restaurants -- scene of our crimes against the nourishment of our own bodies.
So Pollan and other food journalists have an impact in counter-intuitive stories that promote healthful eating. Student journalists show an interest in taking up the cause.
Oh, contrarian journalism looks like a drop in the bucket of greasy fried chicken, reprocessed potatoes layered with hydrogenated fats and 20 secret chemical and synthetic additives.
But the history of movements in media is that crusading journalism works when the facts are right, the message is simple and the warning is commonsense.
You don't go into supermarkets and fast food restaurants to get healthy, you know.