CollegeJournalism.org

As a student journalist, I get exhausted managing my course load, a newspaper and the records custodians determined to deny us

By Joshua Levin

Government officials have found a trick to keep the public from seeing what they are up to: They don’t have to always say no. They can simply make getting the records so difficult that nobody wants to try.

I spent the better part of a year fighting UMass Boston’s attempts to do just that when I requested access to public records for an investigation into the university’s involvement in a Vatican climate initiative published in the campus newspaper, The Mass Media, earlier this year. At each opportunity, administrators missed legal deadlines, claimed frivolous exemptions that the state’s supervisor of records rejected or questioned, and charged fees that exceeded $1,000.

In other words, they did everything they could to make my reporting slower, harder and more costly — and not just to the paper’s budget. The stonewalling also left me feeling drained, discouraging me from pursuing public records for other stories because I simply did not have the energy to spend months fighting for them.

My experience wasn’t unique.

Legal experts frequently discuss the idea that government actions can have a chilling effect on free speech, where the public self-censors to avoid potential government retribution. Abuse of the public records process likewise has a chilling effect on the public’s right to know. By creating procedural and financial hurdles, government actors aim to create enough delay and hassle that requesters give up. And they exhaust the journalists who are trying to answer questions these officials would rather not see asked at all.

In an era where public trust in government and higher education is so low, both must prioritize transparency.

Massachusetts offers an especially grim case study. This year, the Society of Professional Journalists gave the entire state its annual Black Hole Award for “the most heinous violations of the public’s right to know,” citing broad exemptions, weak enforcement mechanisms and persistent delays that impede access to government information.

On paper, the state has a great public records law. Government entities have 10 business days to respond to requests. Records are presumed to be public unless the government can prove that a specific exemption applies. When the government denies a request, the requester can write an informal letter to a state official, the supervisor of records, who will rule on the denial and is empowered to “order timely and appropriate relief” and refer violations of her orders to the attorney general.

Those positive qualities start and end where the page does. Even when siding with the requester, the supervisor of records simply orders the custodian to provide a revised response.

In practice, all this accomplishes is creating a legally sanctioned month-long delay: The supervisor of records takes 10 business days to rule on the appeal, then gives the custodian another 10 business days to revise its response. This repeats each time a custodian re-words its response without substantively changing it.

The process feels like it was designed to wear you down more than to enforce compliance. In my case, I would spend weeks tracking deadlines, consulting legal groups, forming arguments, researching case law, drafting appeal letters and locating the dozens of emails the state requires me to attach to my appeal.

When I received the order in my inbox two weeks later, inevitably, it would outline all the flaws with the university’s response, before concluding the same way: “UMass is ordered to provide Mr. Levin with a response to the request, provided in a manner consistent with this order, the Public Records Law, and its Regulations within ten (10) business days. … Mr. Levin may appeal the substantive nature of UMass’ response within 90 days.” I’ve read it so many times I can recite it from memory. Each time, it meant I was no closer to having something to publish.

The federal government, too, has sought to chill the right to know through public records delays. A recent New York Times analysis found that federal agencies released documents in response to only about 47% of Freedom of Information Act requests in fiscal year 2025, down from 63% in 2010. Despite a 20-day deadline under the federal law, the Times reported, requesters waited an average of 240 days for a response.

In April, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel published a memorandum arguing that the Presidential Records Act, a Nixon-era law which requires the president to preserve records for release after he leaves office, is unconstitutional, thereby potentially gutting another public records law.

Educational institutions also seem particularly devoted to avoiding compliance. Public schools are subject to public records laws, but frequently invoke a federal law intended to protect student educational records, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, as justification for withholding any document that could possibly contain mention of a student.

The Student Press Law Center, a legal group that works with student journalists, has written about these abuses dating back to at least 2005 – including such egregious examples as schools withholding records of parking tickets, public committee meeting minutes and the names of football ticket recipients.

More recently, colleges have cited FERPA to avoid disclosing details of student athletic contracts. In my case, UMass Boston used it as justification to charge The Mass Media more than $1,000 in fees to review administrators’ emails for student names.

These schools’ arguments do not hold water. The Supreme Court has ruled that FERPA applies only to documents that are directly related to a student and maintained by the school as part of a student’s permanent file. Courts in California, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio have applied that ruling to interpret the statute narrowly.

“FERPA does not provide a student with an invisible cloak so that the student can remain hidden from public view while enrolled,” one North Carolina appeals court wrote. Yet schools continue to argue otherwise, with the clear intention of deterring the public from requesting and receiving records – of chilling the right to know.

Despite my passion for this work, I have found myself instinctively avoiding stories that require public records. There is, of course, a pragmatic reason: There are deadlines to make and pages to fill. A story that takes a year to report simply does not help get this week’s paper out on time. Beyond that, the longer a story takes to report, the more likely it is to be old news by the time I have enough to publish, and the more time I waste if it turns out I am chasing a bad lead.

Perhaps the bigger reason, though, is an attempt to protect myself from the stress that months of constant conflict add to the already stressful job that journalism so often is. This is especially true in a student newsroom, where that workload is in addition to college coursework. That isn’t a tradeoff that reporters should have to make.

Public records have been a staple of investigative journalism — the kind that reveals government abuses and public corruption — for decades. Without access to documents, journalists cannot paint a complete picture, and voters are left to evaluate their government based only on what little information officials want to tell them.

The government belongs to the people. So do its records. Our government officials should act like it.

Joshua Levin is a student and freelance journalist in Boston. He served as managing editor of UMass Boston’s student newspaper, The Mass Media, where he was a regional finalist for the SPJ Mark of Excellence and a winner of the SPJ New England FOIA Contest.