Freedom of Information Act

So, I have just come out of a long but interesting lecture about different examples and cases of Freedom of Information. I will blog about different journalists including one of us (a Winchester journalism student who used the freedom of information act to do a good piece of journalism.) Here is a little bit of background statistics before I explain what it is exactly; Around 120,000 requests are made each year for documents. Private citizens made 60% of them, with businesses and journalists accounting for 20%. Journalists' requests took up more of officials' time than businesses', the Act cost £35.5 million in 2005.

Basically, Freedom of Information is the idea that anyone can ask an organisation a general question which has to be answered, as long as it is not an exemption. This means that journalists can look on the websites of the company or organisation under their FOI page where they will find different types of information that is on offer. You can then write to the named FOI officer and ask a question based on the schedule of available documents on offer. They have to reply to you within 20 days with the documents or a valid reason why they cannot provide the information such as it being too expensive to find. There can be a required fee of up to £100 for documents if it is going to cost the organisation money to find the information you need. If they cannot provide the information you are allowed to appeal by writing to the FOI Advocates Appeals and Litigation who will find out why the documents couldn't be given and if a adequate search had been carried out to search for the requested documents.

The Guardian produced an article with a league table to find out how much each chancellor from a variety of universities earned each year under the Freedom of Information Act. They will have achieved this by going onto the different Universities websites and looking under the FOI page to find out who they need to contact. They will have then written a letter to the FOI officer of different universities asking a simple question of how much their chancellor of the university earned each year.

This article is from The Guardian online. I will give a brief overview of how it is effective to use the Freedom of Information Act for a story. The Guardian have used information that is true as it is from the sources website. This rules out any opportunity for them to sue The Guardian about where they got the information from. It is interesting for the readers of The Guardian who are assumed to have mostly attended university. It also allows them to provide statistics based on the information they have found such as 'the hightest-paid VC gets £474,000, and 19 get more than £300,000, including employer pension contributions. By contrast, the prime minister, Gordon Brown, gets £197,000 plus a pension.' As some of you may have noticed I have quoted this directly from the paper where 'highest' was spelt incorrectly. These facts will be interesting to the readers as they can see how much these people are earning on average compared to other professional jobs.

More closer to home though is the journalist Julie Cordier who is a 3rd year here at Winchester. She used the Freedom of Information Act to produce a good piece of Journalism for WINOL. It revealed that up to 38 serving police officers in Hampshire have criminal convictions. This story is in the public interest and made an interesting local story for WINOL that can be seen as 'true' as the facts were given to her by the Hampshire Police. Reading her blog about this story, it states that she discussed the legal issues with Chris and decided they needed to be careful with the wording of the article. I think this is a good example of investigative journalism that avoids defamatory because no one has been identified as the image has been blurred. It also consists of a balanced argument emphasising that there is no evidence based on this. It also takes into account the police defense who stated that they still do a good job despite the convictions.

One last note is the broad brush defamation which is where journalists categorise a small number of people and defame them as a whole through their profession. This can lead to all of the individuals suing as there is a limited amount of them in the company. This is what happened in the Banburny police case which lead to the Daily Mail being sued by all 40 officers. There are also documents that do not have to be given out as they are known as exemptions such as spying or topics to do with secrecy. The questions put to the FOI are also best if they are short, clear and to the point as vague questions such as how much do people earn? do not have to be answered.