Between the Lines

Sunshine Week, America’s celebration of the public’s right to know what its governments do, comes this year at a particularly sobering time.

The annual event began Sunday and continues through the week, with media outlets throughout the country using the occasion to call attention to the laws that preserve public access to information and seek to keep federal, state and local governments transparent to the people they serve.

What makes the time so sobering, of course, is that Sunshine Week comes as the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues.

Thanks to the open access to information that citizens in the U.S. enjoy — and the technology that can bring images of a war on the other side of the world into our living rooms — Americans know about the atrocity of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

We know, too, that our own country is impacted and how the U.S. government is helping the besieged people of Ukraine escape the violence and/or defend their homeland.

Indeed, the U.S. government in the weeks leading up to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to strike Ukraine supplied the world with the intelligence that telegraphed much of the movement of the Russian forces into the neighboring country.

American media have been on the ground reporting from Ukraine and Russia as well as Poland and the other European countries into which displaced Ukrainians are flooding as their own country is being ripped to pieces by Putin’s forces.

Meanwhile, the Russian population whose leader wreaked all this destruction know little about their country’s role in all of this. Not even the troops dispatched to carry out the invasion were fully aware of why they’ve been sent there.

At Putin’s bidding, Russian lawmakers have even made it a crime, punishable by 15 years in prison, for journalists to report the truth to the people in Russia or even for anyone else to spread the word to others. No one can call the war a war or mention invasion under the new law that criminalizes such “fake” news.

What has followed has been the shutdown of independent news sites in Russia as well as the pullout of some foreign press. The Russian people are largely shut off from alternatives to government-controlled media coverage while the Russian state media puts out a continuous stream of misinformation, or actual fake news, about why their troops are killing their Ukrainian neighbors and Russian soldiers are coming home in body bags.

Meanwhile, the streets of one Ukrainian city after another are being reduced to rubble, their citizens continuously terrorized, many women and children and elderly forced into exodus.

All of this stands in great contrast to what happens in the U.S., where the press is free to report what it sees and where laws protect public access to the meetings and records of government at all levels.

The system isn’t perfect, which is really why Sunshine Week was established back in 2005.

It provides a welcome opportunity to remind Americans of the critical role of a free press in this society and of the equally important role of informed citizen participation in government — especially this year.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Brenda Blagg is a freelance columnist. E-mail comments or questions to brendajblagg@gmail.com}