June 17, 2003
He fights for the public's right to know
Bob Arndorfer, SUN STAFF WRITER
University of Florida Professor Bill Chamberlin poses outside his office at Weimer Hall where he is the director of the Brechner Citizen Access Project and teaches media law and the Freedom of Information Act. (Photo by Laura Van Dyke / Special to the Sun)
In some ways, Bill Chamberlin seemed a newsroom natural.
He wasn't very good at math. In junior high in Moses Lake, Wash. - when he first began contributing to a newspaper - he had an affinity for being where things were happening. And thanks to parents who toiled in the public school system, he had a genetic predisposition for public affairs, politics and history - things that come in handy in the world of journalism.
But Chamberlin, a reporter-turned-academic who heads the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project at the University of Florida, also was an oddity 30 years ago when he last worked in a newsroom.
"I didn't smoke or drink, and I've never liked coffee," Chamberlin, 58, said recently after getting his morning caffeine boost from a Pepsi One. "I guess I was not a real journalist."
That's an arguable point.
As a nationally recognized specialist in media law, he long has worked to open public records to journalists and the public. He was recruited to UF in 1987 as founding director of the Joseph L. Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, successor to the UF College of Journalism and Communications' Florida Freedom of Information Clearinghouse founded 10 years earlier.
Chamberlin is the Joseph L. Brechner Eminent Scholar in mass communications, a position that allows him to nurture his passion for mentoring graduate students in media law. In 1999, he helped launch the access project, a herculean endeavor to document and assess public access to local government information in all 50 states.
Chamberlin sees his work with journalists and students as particularly crucial in this age of tightened government restrictions on information that began in earnest following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"I'm very concerned because we're in a very critical time in history when the president doesn't want to share information," he said. "That's one of the bases of our form of government.
"I think it's critical that the public knows as much as possible about the background behind the government's decisions. In order to hold the administration accountable, we need to see as much data as possible without putting troops at risk and making us more vulnerable to terrorism."
He said he also is concerned about efforts the Bush administration is making to examine and curtail citizen comment, such as the Patriot Act that was enacted with little debate just weeks after the terrorist attacks.
"Such laws as those that require librarians to disclose the reading habits of citizens, and then make it impossible for librarians to discuss that this is happening, threaten to curtail our vital liberties," Chamberlin said.
His interest in First Amendment issues developed out of an early career in journalism that had its start in a small desert community on the arid eastern side of Washington's Cascade mountain range. He grew up in Moses Lake in central Washington, the older of two children to a public school teacher and administrator.
He always had an interest in athletics, Chamberlin said, but as a "98-pound weakling," that interest tended to manifest itself in team management and scorekeeping. He kept the stats for his junior high wrestling team and supplied information on the team to the local newspaper. While in high school, he did some sports writing and began developing his skills as a reporter.
"By the time I got to college, I realized sports journalism wouldn't keep my interest very long," he said.
His real interest was in public affairs, nurtured in part, he suspects, by his parents' dinner-table discussions of the challenges of public education.
He left the sagebrush and jackrabbits of Moses Lake for misty Seattle and the University of Washington. While earning a degree in journalism, he worked for the school's information services, as a reporter and editor on the student newspaper and for the Seattle bureau of United Press International.
After earning a master's degree in political science at the University of Wisconsin, he was tugged in both directions - journalism and academia.
He had gotten some classroom experience, having taught journalism at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg. It was, he said, a comfortable fit.
But his inherited instincts for teaching weren't strong enough - then at least - to keep him from going to Washington, D.C., and getting a reporting job with Congressional Quarterly. In Washington, he said, he got a taste of the good and bad of journalism on the national level, including an unsettling acceptance of imperfection - even to some degree at the Quarterly, which he said was a stickler for stylistic accuracy.
"I realized my personality was a better fit with research and teaching than daily journalism," Chamberlin said.
After a few months, he and his wife, Jeanne - a library specialist whom he married 36 years ago next Tuesday - tired of the crime and big-city pace of the nation's capital and returned to Washington state. Among his stop-gap jobs was pushing cans along a conveyor in a potato factory.
Inspired by his favorite undergraduate class, Chamberlin returned to the University of Washington to earn a doctorate, specializing in mass media law.
"I became interested in the role of journalism in our form of government," Chamberlin said. "I was committed to the fact that there has to be adequate information flow for the government to work. People have to understand what the government is doing."
Doctorate in hand, Chamberlin went to the University of North Carolina to teach journalism and publish extensively in the area of media law.
Eleven years later he was still happy at UNC, he said, and had no interest in leaving. But Ralph Lowenstein, then dean of UF's journalism school, came calling and was "very persuasive," Chamberlin said.
Lowenstein said Chamberlin's involvement with the Brechner Center has brought it to national prominence "as one of the top freedom of information centers in America." He said Chamberlin's reputation in his field also has attracted the top doctoral candidates in media law to UF.
"And with the Citizen Access Project, I've likened it to the human genome project," said Lowenstein, who now is retired. "The implications for press freedom are similar to the implications of the human genome project and almost as intricate.
"That project lists, or will when completed, all the open meetings and records laws in every state and how they rank," he said. "It's a tremendous boon for reporters . . . and for helping them make their states freer in terms of press freedom. And it's really all Bill's creation."
To sort out the complexities of the access project and other aspects of his job, Chamberlin said he enjoys walking.
Often he walks on beaches, and has collected seashells that are displayed all over his house.
He said another way he and his wife - who have no children - unwind is serving as surrogate grandparents to a 4- and 6-year-old who don't have either set of grandparents.
"It's an important way to relax," he said.
The couple also often have grad students over for dinner.
"I like to inspire their development, and they inspire me," Chamberlin said. "Nurturing graduate students is one of the things I get the most joy out of."
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Bob Arndorfer can be reached at (352) 374-5042 or arndorb@gvillesun.com.