Our View: Freedom of information is necessary for journalists to continue to inform the people and aid them in healthy democratic decisions.

This semester, The Daily has made a concerted effort to educate our readership on freedom of information issues and to advocate for greater transparency from the administration and the local government.

The issue of free access to information is not just important to journalists, it is an absolutely essential right for any citizen of a democracy.

In a democracy, it is vital that citizens stay informed and keep an eye on what their representatives are doing. If the voting public is uninformed or misinformed, democracy cannot function. These officials work for the public, so the public has the power and responsibility to hold them accountable for their actions. These are the people making your laws and spending your money. They need to know you are watching.

It creates a culture of accountability that helps keep officials in line. Even the most honest public official could be tempted to do things the easy, unethical way at some point in their career. Public accountability is necessary to keep the country running smoothly and in the best interests of the people.

This is where journalism comes in. Media outlets are a bridge bringing information to the public, so you can stay informed. Any citizen could file an open records request and keep watch over public officials. But because the average person doesn’t have the time or training to do that, journalists are necessary. Like with any other business, when a need arises, people step up to fill it.

Journalists are able to devote their days to the important task of watching the actions of public bodies and reporting their findings to the public. We do this so you don’t have to.

We’re not going out there requesting records just looking for trouble, waiting for a representative to mess up. Filing records requests is simply part of our job. It’s how we keep track of what’s going on. It’s how we investigate and find information to report. It’s how we ensure important information doesn’t slip through the cracks.

We request many records that never turn into stories because nothing is off about them. If things are going right, people simply are doing their jobs. And a public official doing his or her job correctly is not news — it should be the status quo.

You cannot just trust public relations departments, as one commenter on OUDaily.com suggested. Spokespeople have a clear conflict of interest, as they are hired to make a company look better. Their goals are in direct conflict with those of a journalist — they are paid to spin information, in some cases directly evading or downplaying the truth. Open records give us a way of externally verifying the truth.

We at The Daily — like most journalists — are not motivated by a dislike of our public officials or a hunger for sensational stories of wrongdoing. We’re simply motivated to provide a service that is in the best interest of our community. Making information public and holding officials accountable can only improve the OU community.

Recent national stories have vividly illustrated how easy it is for horrible secrets to hide from the public eye for decades. Locally, without public records, no one ever would have known that OU paid off a professor accused of dangerously experimenting on his students and allowed him to represent himself as an employee of OU while he searched for a job.

He could have been hired by a university with no idea what he is accused of, and OU could have never been held accountable to the public for this questionable decision.

In order to continue the important service of keeping our representatives honest and our readership informed — and to keep empowering you to make informed decisions about who and what to support or protest — we will continue to work next semester to increase transparency and improve open records policies.