Candidate data aims at basics of democracy

Newspaper people are often criticized as "busybodies" who make their living by prying into the private lives of others. But tell me, what insidious profit do we earn by contacting political candidates and telling readers about them?

True, we do stake the sale of our newspapers on our customers' confidence that we will tell them about the important things going on in their world and their community, and we do tell them a lot about the people who want to be their leaders. So, I'll give you that in that sense, we profit from giving our customers information. But let me add a couple of points about the insidious side of our vocation.

First, as you are no doubt aware if you read the newspapers, we don't profit all that handsomely.

And second, the information we seek to provide about political candidates is generally critical to readers who aim to govern themselves.

So, it is frustrating for us in a professional sense - and aggravating in a citizenship sense - when, nearly every election cycle, we run into problems getting some community officials to provide basic information about people who are either holding an elected office or seeking one.

Last week, after repeated difficulties in some cases getting information so we could contact political candidates, we editorialized about municipalities and school districts that were withholding required information or making absurd paperwork demands before they would release it. Thankfully, the Illinois attorney general's office read the editorial and jumped in, helping break some of the logjams. But I constantly return to this question: Why does it have to go this far?

Why must it take intervention from the attorney general's office to get a public official to produce the most basic information about official public business? How can an elected official not know that such information ought to be readily available to the public - and more to the point, how can anyone who would aspire to do the public's business not want to openly share that work and the information it produces?

One potential reason, of course, is that a particular official may be doing things he or she doesn't want people to know about. It's easy to understand why these people don't like newspapers snooping around.

Another, I suppose, is that if you are doing your job in the open, you open yourself to criticism and you put yourself in a position to have to explain your actions. Even if you're entirely honest, it's so much easier and more comfortable to work if you don't have to constantly stop and explain yourself. But if you take a public job, especially an elected public job, it would seem you accept this inconvenience as a routine hazard of the job.

Knowledge, it is said, is power, so I suppose many officials may withhold information simply as a means of asserting their authority.

Whatever the reason, all these situations are a contradiction of our nation's core values. They lead us - and if us, then you as well - to have to struggle to acquire something that rests at the very foundation of our democracy. It is astonishing to me that some elected officials who otherwise consider themselves to be model patriots cannot see this.

So, we continue to fight when and how we need to in order to get information you will need come April to elect officials who will make decisions with a direct and profound effect on you and your community. Yes, we and our employees hope to make a modest living from this endeavor, but we also believe the real benefit is to your way of life.

• Jim Slusher is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.