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Laudable sentiments, to be sure. Yet there is something unmentioned on the pages of these two giants of the news media, and it is this: filing FOIA requests is a staple of investigative journalism. But when it comes to rooting out documents about the war on terrorism, the media, in too many cases, have been content to delegate that task to public-interest groups such as the ACLU and People for the American Way. "The public-interest groups have been prolific users of the FOI Act — in some ways more than journalists, because they have time to wait for the results, whereas journalists don’t," says Rebecca Daugherty, who directs the Freedom of Information Service Center, which is part of the Arlington, Virginia–based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Daugherty is right, but the reporter-on-a-deadline problem is only part of the picture. The larger truth is that the Bush White House has contributed to a mentality in which journalists, all too often, assume that any FOIA requests they file will not be fulfilled for months, even years — and that it may take the intervention of lawyers. In other words, using FOIA costs time and money, two commodities that are in short supply in the era of corporate media consolidation.

The Bush administration’s assault on FOIA began formally in October 2001, when then–attorney general John Ashcroft issued a memorandum that clamped down hard on the kinds of information that could be made public. Ashcroft encouraged officials to refuse to honor FOIA requests, pledging to defend those rejections in court if necessary. It was a complete reversal from Ashcroft’s Clinton-administration predecessor, Janet Reno, who had ordered agencies to make records public as long as there was no clear harm in doing so. And though Ashcroft’s memo had been prepared even before 9/11, it would soon become a key weapon in the Bush administration’s arsenal of secrecy.

The obstacles created by the Ashcroft memo and the manner in which it has been implemented have proved formidable enough to discourage even elite media organizations. In December, Slate columnist Eric Umansky, who writes the "Today’s Papers" feature, contacted reporters and editors at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times to ask whether any of them had filed FOIA requests about the administration’s detention policies, as the ACLU had. Three had not; following the Abu Ghraib revelations of last spring, the Post did seek documents under FOIA, only to be stonewalled by the Defense Department. "If the way the FOIA works nowadays, more often than not, is that you need to end up filing a lawsuit, I think that you’re going to have journalists think twice about that," Umansky told me. "It becomes a question of cost, it becomes a question of organizational commitment. They [journalists] don’t think there is the organizational commitment." In that respect, Umansky adds, "the administration has succeeded in raising the cost of filing a FOIA."

Brant Houston, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, which is based at the University of Missouri, agrees. "The ACLU has lawyers," Houston observes. "If you aren’t going to threaten to go to court and you aren’t going to follow through, then you’re a toothless tiger. But the ACLU is following through, and you can see the results." On the other hand, Houston says news organizations could do a better job of thinking beyond the next deadline and filing FOIA requests that may pay off somewhere down the road. "You’ve got to plan ahead," he says. "It requires planning and it requires follow-up." Needless to say, those are two qualities that tend to be in short supply at news organizations, both large and small.

There does not appear to be any real way of quantifying the chilling effect that the Bush administration — and the Ashcroft memo — has had on FOIA. Several years ago the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy conducted a study of FOIA requests to four government agencies during the first six months of 2001: the General Services Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation, and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It turned out that just five percent of the 2285 FOIA requests came from journalists, with 40 percent coming from corporations. But it’s hard to know what to make of that data; and it’s scarcely surprising that corporations regulated by these agencies would want to know as much as they could about their inner workings.

According to Harry Hammitt, the editor and publisher of a trade journal on FOIA and privacy laws called Access Reports, it’s not even entirely clear how many FOIA requests the federal government receives each year. He places the number at 800,000 to 900,000, depending on what kinds of requests are counted. Neither he nor the FOI Service Center’s Rebecca Daugherty knows how many of those requests come from the news media. In general, Hammitt says, FOIA tends to be interpreted more loosely during Democratic administrations and more restrictively during Republican administrations. Still, he sees the attitude of the Bush administration as being uniquely censorious.

"These people really do hate these laws," Hammitt says. "I think that at the top there is a clear disdain and dislike for these sort of statutes."