PROTECTING THE FIRST Amendment has never been easy – and has often involved a lonely struggle. So each year we celebrate the winners of the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California Chapter's annual Freedom of Information Awards, which are given to those who fight the hardest for our right to know.

Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

John Carne

When attorney John Carne quietly slipped out of the Crosby, Heafey, Roach, and May law office last December to retire and move to Nevada, he left behind a profound, 30-year legacy of defending the First Amendment rights of media outlets throughout California.

Carne is recognized as a preeminent expert on freedom of the press, and his work has ranged from protecting reporters' need to keep sources confidential to opening up access to secret records. Listed in The Best Lawyers in America, he also taught media law to aspiring journalists at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a mentor to many, his admirers told us.

The leading authority on shield law issues, Carne made sure journalists he represented never had to testify to anything that wasn't already public, First Amendment attorney Thomas Burke, of Davis Wright Tremaine, told us. "He wrote a chapter on the shield law issue which is probably the most read chapter for trial objections, period," Burke said. "Every lawyer that uses that book learns the law basically as taught by John."

Among Carne's important cases: In 1988's Stockton Newspapers Inc. v. Superior Court, he argued that if a reporter was dealing with a controversial issue and presented both sides, he or she should be protected from a libel suit. He established a reporter's right to examine lists of questions asked of potential jurors in a court case in 1990's Lesher Communications, Inc. v. Superior Court. And in 1993, after landlord Adam Sparks sued the Bay Guardian over a joke in an April Fool's issue, he successfully argued that parody provides protection against libel charges.

"John's philosophy was that when you had a newsroom First Amendment case, you treated it like it was the most precious thing in the world, because it will affect whether reporters will be able to freely or not freely do their work," Burke said. "He was like no other – an absolute jewel."

"It's nice to know that after spending 29 years fighting for the things you believe in, there are people who noticed and paid attention," said Carne, who, with typical modesty, described his work as "just trying to make reporters' jobs easier." (Savannah Blackwell)

Commentary

Jon Carroll (San Francisco Chronicle)

On Sept. 10, San Francisco Chronicle writer Jon Carroll's column was a parody of for-profit product placement.

The following day, less than 24 hours after the terrorist attacks, Carroll offered a somber warning about the varied threats to personal freedom that would likely arise from the conflict.

It wasn't an uncharacteristic switch for Carroll, who often alternates intelligent political statements with reflections on his domestic life (a recent column began, "When last I wrote about my sewer").

But Carroll's warning was particularly apt – and he delivered it when few columnists were doing more than expressing their anger over the attacks.

"There will be pressure to suspend our freedoms, to allow the government to invade our privacy and control our speech as part of the glossy new war," he wrote Sept. 12. "If terrorists force America to give up its freedoms, then they will have won. If we use our rage instead of our wisdom, we'll be just another dictatorship, and Sept. 11 will become the day we destroyed ourselves."

Just a few days later Carroll reprinted the hateful words a couple of readers had written to him about Muslims. And he made a point you probably heard repeated: "The hijackers are no more typical Muslims than Timothy McVeigh is a typical Christian."

Carroll told us he was immediately frightened by "the upswelling of sort of brainless patriotism" he saw on TV and elsewhere. "I received enormous amounts of hate mail," he said. "It made it scarier to do these things, but I also sort of felt like I had been handed a job."

Carroll's column is slowly getting back to normal. But he continues to regularly weigh in on international events – and often with an eye to protecting the rights of every U.S. resident. (Tali Woodward)

Public Official

State controller Kathleen Connell

Controller Kathleen Connell was willing to do what Gov. Gray Davis would not: reveal the details of long-term energy contracts the governor had signed with power generators around the country.

When Davis negotiated the contracts – which amounted to more than $40 billion – last March, consumer advocates suspected he had locked California into a series of bad deals that would drain the state's coffers for years to come. But they couldn't tell for sure, because Davis argued that it would hurt the state's negotiating position to let the public see the fine print. In June, Superior Court Judge Linda Quinn ordered him to release the terms, but he blacked out a great deal of important information – such as where power would be produced and transmitted.

Quinn ordered him to release the redacted data, but Connell beat him to the punch and put the contracts in their entirety up on her Web site. She even posted short-term contracts Davis had hoped to keep secret for several more months. The best part: the site is easy and fun to use. Viewers check out the redacted material by clicking on a light switch.

While Connell's decision may have been politically motivated (she and the governor have a competitive and acrimonious relationship), her decision was important to Californians whose tax dollars have been jeopardized by Davis's moves.

"Only when the controller released the material did we get to see the extent to which Governor Davis sold out the public," Doug Heller, senior consumer advocate with the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, told us. "These contracts were not just sweetheart deals for the power companies in terms of the price; they shifted the liability for a broad range of issues from the companies to the consumers. If we hadn't the opportunity to read these contracts, there'd be so many more questions. Now we understand and have a better opportunity to fix the problems." (Blackwell)

Journalist, Online Reporting

Lisa Davis and the SF Weekly

SF Weekly reporter Lisa Davis scored the investigative coup of her career the old-fashioned way: by digging into an Everest-size pile of government documents in search of a buried narrative.

The story Davis uncovered and related last summer in a two-part, 15,000-word series titled "Fallout" is a stunner. The basic synopsis: for two decades United States Navy personnel stationed at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard did completely insane things with nuclear material – like selling radioactive ships as scrap metal, asking humans to drink radioactive elements for experimental purposes, and ditching thousands of tons of nuclear waste in the bay and near the Farallon Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Worse still, since shuttering the base in the early 1970s, the navy has done little to gauge the environmental consequences of its atomic follies.

Davis successfully convinced the National Archive to declassify pertinent naval records, traveled to Nevada to review U.S. Department of Energy documents, hunted down and interviewed aging former navy staffers – one guy, memorably, talked about blowing up German shepherds during early A-bomb tests – and turned to scientists for help decoding the jargon-heavy navy paperwork.

But journalistic sleuthing was only the first step of the project. "One of the biggest challenges," Davis said, "was putting a year's worth of reporting into something people can read."

To back up the story, the Weekly created a slick Web site and posted many of the documents Davis had collected – an effort that garnered the paper SPJ's recognition for online reporting. The site, Davis said, "gives readers a better and clearer idea of what we found.... The whole point is to give the community information." (A.C. Thompson)

Legal Counsel

Thomas Burke

Media lawyer Thomas Burke is that rare type of person who actually figured out his calling early in life. "Believe it or not," he said, "I always wanted to do something with news." He worked as a radio broadcaster in high school and majored in broadcast journalism at Arizona State University, but he also loved debate. Senior year he hit on First Amendment law as a natural next step. "In my family, historically, either you were a preacher or a teacher, and I think being a lawyer is kind of a combination of both."

Burke was determined to defend journalists against those who would try to hinder their pursuit of information. He cut his teeth in Arizona as a paralegal for the firm of Brown and Bain on a libel suit that arose from the murder of Don Bolles, an Arizona Republic reporter covering organized crime.

Not all First Amendment law is quite so dramatic. Often tiny details can make or break a piece of legislation. San Francisco's Sunshine Ordinance, for example, was one of the strongest in the country when it was passed by the Board of Supervisors in 1993, but city departments still managed to find ways around it. Investing hundreds of hours of pro bono work, Burke helped crack down on those abuses by drafting the Sunshine Initiative, passed by voters in 1999 as Proposition G.

As a lawyer at Crosby, Heafey, Roach, and May in Oakland and now at Davis Wright Tremaine in San Francisco, he has spent years training reporters and editors at the Bay Guardian, the San Jose Metro, the Contra Costa Times, and the Alameda Newspaper Group to avoid libel suits through careful research and writing.

Most recently, Burke has worked on behalf of the California First Amendment Coalition to push the state to release its Committee on Un-American Activities files to the public. According to Burke, the committee existed from 1941 to the late 1960s and interviewed hundreds if not thousands of people suspected of radical leanings. As a result of his efforts, many of the transcripts from those hearings have already been unsealed. Now Burke hopes to pry open the committee's investigative records as well.

What keeps him going? The free flow of information is "critical to how the government functions," Burke said. "It's one of the things I've been put on Earth to do." (Cassi Feldman)

News Media (Large Newspaper)

Oakland Tribune

Since a former city employee brought sexual harassment charges in late 2000 against Jacques Barzaghi, who is a top adviser to Mayor Jerry Brown, the Oakland Tribune has pursued the story vigorously.

The city settled the harassment suit and temporarily suspended Barzaghi without pay, but details about the case were murky. Tribune City Hall reporter Laura Counts filed several public records requests, but the city refused to give her the records she sought.

So in April 2001 the Trib filed suit against the city under the California Public Records Act.

Under court order, the city has since turned over a few of the documents – including the original complaint filed against Barzaghi. But almost a year after the public records suit was filed, Oakland still refuses to release an investigative report that includes interviews with other female employees about their experiences working in City Hall. The state Court of Appeals ruled that the document is protected under attorney-client privilege, but the Tribune has appealed to the state Supreme Court to gain access to it.

Counts told us that she has pursued the documents because there is "a lot of interest in the case."

City officials "are claiming that they want to protect the women," she explained. "But we've said all along that they could redact names and identifying characteristics."

"To us it's a clear case of public interest," Tribune editor Mario Dianda told us. "[Barzaghi] is basically Jerry Brown's senior advisor – no matter what title they've given him now. And it's been alleged that he harasses women. We don't know how far the harassment went." (Woodward)

News Media (Small Newspaper)

Tahoe Daily Tribune

The Tahoe Daily Tribune stood up for the basic right of a paper to decide what is and what isn't newsworthy when it fought an El Dorado County Superior Court judge's order prohibiting the paper from running color photographs of defendants in a murder trial last year.

The judge restricted the printing of the photographs, which showed two alleged murderers in orange prison-issue jumpsuits, after the defendants argued that the images would prejudice potential jurors. But the Trib's attorneys successfully convinced the same judge to overturn his own order, which had restricted all newspapers reporting on the case from printing the photos. "Whether the newspaper can publish color or black-and-white photos of a defendant may seem like a trivial thing," Tribune attorney James Houpt said in a press release. "But the freedom to report the news without censorship of any kind is vitally important to the press. If a judge can order the newspaper to publish only black-and-white photos, can he also forbid the newspaper from running the article on the front page?" Attorneys for the Placerville Mountain Democrat and the Reno Gazette-Journal joined Houpt in his defense of the case. (Rachel Brahinsky)

Organization

World Free Press Institute

The mission of the World Free Press Institute is to train journalists in Belarus and eastern Africa to gather public information and report the news. But the reality that WFPI staffers encounter can be truly devastating stories – tales that make U.S. journalists "look like spoiled brats," WFPI founder Clay Haswell told us.

Take Ethiopian editor Kifle Mulat. "He's this big strapping handsome guy," Haswell said, recalling the moment they met, "and the only thing I pick up on is that he's got this weird dental issue going on. I say, 'I've heard you spent a lot of time in jail.' He says, 'Yeah, I spent about six months every year for the past six years in jail.' And I say, joking, 'The cuisine must [be bad],' so he says, in all seriousness, 'Yeah, last time the food was so bad my gums rotted. I lost all my teeth.' "

Haswell, who is also an Associated Press bureau chief in San Francisco, founded WFPI with several other journalists in 1997. Since then, in addition to developing a support network for the independent press in east Africa, WFPI has focused on the nation of Belarus. Haswell described the climate for journalism in that nation in this way: "Belarus has a real low-I.Q. dictator who has taken it as his personal challenge in life to eliminate all forms of personal freedom, especially for newspapers."

The support the group offers might seem basic to U.S. reporters, but it's essential in many parts of the world. For example, after setting up the WFPI Web site (www.pressfreedom.org), Haswell told us, WFPI "started getting requests like, 'How do we cover a democratic election, because we think we may have one soon.' Stuff like that." Eventually WFPI began sponsoring training seminars on environmental reporting in the Chernobyl radioactive zone, on the concept of public documents, and on how to pry information from recalcitrant government agencies. (Brahinsky)

Advocacy

James Chadwick (Gray Cary Ware and Freidenrich)

Soon after a California First Amendment Coalition board meeting adjourned several years ago, members found themselves back in attorney James Chadwick's San Francisco office complaining about the sorry state of California's public access law. The courts had revised the act in a number of ways, making it harder for the public to monitor how government conducts its business.

"We bitched and moaned," Tom Newton, general counsel for the California Newspaper Association, said. "And James said what we ought to do is ... see if we can put a constitutional amendment before the people."

Thus SCA 7 was born.

But not before years' worth of dogged determination on the part of Chadwick, who is credited with being the principal author of the bill sponsored by state senator John Burton, now before the state senate (see "Cloudy California," page 17).

What prompted his due diligence in opening up the public's right to government access? "My unbelievable frustration with the constant erosion of the public access law in the state of California," said Chadwick, now an attorney at Gray Cary Ware and Freidenrich in Palo Alto, which specializes in media law.

For more than two years Chadwick refined the bill's language, pinpointing where government has been able to shut the public out in deliberations that should be open. If passed by first two-thirds of the legislature and then by California voters, the law would make access to government records and meetings a fundamental right of the people – and profoundly change the climate of secrecy that now pervades the state. And thus far many First Amendment watchdogs are confident that some version of Chadwick's bill will be embraced by the voters.

"I think people who run into this issue are really frustrated," Chadwick said. (Melissa Houston)

Cartoonist

Tom Meyer

Political cartoonists are often on the cutting edge of social commentary. The good ones always try to say what the editorial writers can't quite get away with, to push the boundaries of debate. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the San Francisco Chronicle's Tom Meyer has filled that role with distinction.

An Oct. 4 cartoon showed the Statue of Liberty and a mob outside saying things like "She's not from here, is she?" and "I heard she helps others get here" and "What's with the spiked hair? She must be an anarchist. Call in the guard!"

Three days later a parody of the children's classic Goodnight Moon showed a frightened child in bed with a caption that read, in part, "Goodnight FBI and CIA / Goodnight wiretapper in the black beret." A Jan. 29 cartoon showed Bush and Cheney shredding a copy of the Freedom of Information Act, with the vice president saying, "The state of the union is none of your business."

It hasn't been easy taking on a popular president and raising unpopular issues about the price of the government's crackdown on civil liberties. "I've been getting a lot of hate mail," Meyer, who has been penning cartoons for the Chron since 1981, told us. "But so what? I really feel that when someone has an 85 percent popularity rating, it represents the tyranny of the majority. It's the job of journalists to stick up for the civil liberties of the other 15 percent." (Tim Redmond)

Public Service

San Francisco Bay Guardian

Since publishing its first annual Freedom of Information issue in 1987, the Bay Guardian has probably devoted as much crusading news coverage to FOI as it has to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. And for much the same reason: to put control of public resources – in this case, the government itself – into the hands of the public.

Regular reporting, annual FOI issues, and major efforts to reform open-government laws have not only raised awareness of FOI as an important issue but also helped give Californians a greater say in state and local government.

The first Bay Guardian FOI issue probed the activities of the "secrecy lobby" – lobbyists for local and regional governmental agencies that opposed the increased public access created by the state's Public Records Act and open-meetings laws.

"Nobody had done this story, and nobody would do it in Sacramento," editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann said. After that the FOI issue took on an evolution of its own: "Once you thought about it, there were a lot of great stories."

Many of those stories led to real changes in the way state and local governments operate. A 1991 story exposed the fact that some Bay Area city councils were holding meetings and retreats, unannounced, over wine and lobster at five-star restaurants – on the public tab. The public outcry brought an end to the practice.

In that issue the Bay Guardian also called for "a complete overhaul of California's open-government laws" – then continued pushing through stories and editorials to bring it about. An investigation into loopholes in the Brown Act and the Public Records Act led to legislation by state senator Quentin Kopp to close those loopholes. It passed. Similar stories led to successful campaigns to enact the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance in 1993 and the Sunshine Initiative six years later.

In addition to covering and advocating for changes in and expansion of open-government laws, the Bay Guardian has educated the public about how to use them. "User's guides" followed the enactment of the Sunshine Ordinance and the Sunshine Initiative, and the FOI Resource Guide is an ever-expanding part of the annual issue; it gets a lot of hits on the Bay Guardian's Web site, at www.sfbg.com. (Randy Lyman)

Student Journalist (College)

Orion, California State University, Chico

There's no better way for a student to learn how the real world works than to jump right in. And that's what a group of Chico State journalism students did last year when they set out to see if their school, among other Butte County government agencies, was adhering to California's Public Records Act.

The results were grim. The students asked for 18 records from seven public offices; one-third of the requests were denied. Even more were initially rejected, until the students explained why they needed the documentation, despite the fact that the information was clearly public.

"Students learn a lot from these exercises," said associate professor of journalism Glen Bleske. "They gain appreciation for the dreary work of covering local government. They wrestle and push for answers. They feel frustration. They learn to be brave – we always have to remember that reporting takes courage, and when you are dealing with some government officials, you need to have a Rambo in your heart."

Their investigative report, a package of six smart, well-crafted stories, appeared in the May 9, 2001, edition of the Orion, the school's student newspaper. Included in the articles are some pretty funny responses the students got when they made their humble requests of civil servants. Student Jeanine Gore, for example, was told she'd need to hire a lawyer should she want a list of pupils expelled from Chico Unified School District, writes Sandoval Chagoya, the paper's online news editor. Even funnier is Butte College's human resources employee Sue Brown. She explains to the Orion's intrepid reporter (who was looking for the salaries of the college's professors), "If I knew why you wanted it, I may be able to help you find what you're looking for." Sure, Sue. (Houston)

Student Journalists (High School)

Stella Robertson and Ruth Osorio

Stella Robertson and Ruth Osorio weren't trying to get attention. The Novato High School seniors simply wanted to get their newspaper out and didn't appreciate the school administration slowing them down.

When their paper, the Buzz, published a controversial opinion piece about immigration last fall, some students were offended and staged a protest. Apparently the school's principal, Lisa Schwartz, caught flack for letting the story run. According to Robertson, who coedited the next edition, Schwartz responded by becoming hypervigilant, quibbling over misplaced commas and grammatical mistakes. "It got ridiculous," Robertson said. "It felt like she was purposely delaying the paper."

Neither she nor Osorio agreed with the sentiment of the original op-ed, they told us, but they didn't see why the publication of one controversial story should lead to what they saw as a crackdown on freedom of the press. With the support of their advisor, Jennifer Leib, they contacted the Student Press Law Center in Virginia and learned the basics of First Amendment law. The law "basically prohibits anything slanderous, libelous, obscene, or likely to incite a riot," Osorio said. "There's no other reason they can censor." They took that information straight to their principal and ran a workshop for other students on the paper.