Jack Shafer: There's No Such Thing as a Bad FOIA Request
[Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.]
...I have no dog in the fight between Cronon and the Republican who filed the records request, other than my long-term support of strong local, state, and federal FOIA laws and rigorous application of them. Yeah, I know, there's a huge element of the political stunt to the filing. But calling it McCarthyesque, as Fallows does, is a complete overreach. Joe would have never done anything so flatfootedly procedural! Likewise, denouncing the request as an assault on academic freedom, as Cronon does, is also a stretch. If university emails are under the purview of records requests, every citizen—even self-identified Republican Party apparatchiks—has every right to file a request....
Read entire article at Slate
...I have no dog in the fight between Cronon and the Republican who filed the records request, other than my long-term support of strong local, state, and federal FOIA laws and rigorous application of them. Yeah, I know, there's a huge element of the political stunt to the filing. But calling it McCarthyesque, as Fallows does, is a complete overreach. Joe would have never done anything so flatfootedly procedural! Likewise, denouncing the request as an assault on academic freedom, as Cronon does, is also a stretch. If university emails are under the purview of records requests, every citizen—even self-identified Republican Party apparatchiks—has every right to file a request....