Colloquium Series: Michael Schudson, Columbia University, New York, NY

“The Rise of the Right to Know:Transparency and How Americans Gained Faith in Distrust”

The emergence of a right to know or the expectation that there should be a right to know, the institutionalization of transparency practices, and the identification of disclosure with democracy did not wait for the Internet to become important in American life, but nor can much of it be traced back to the founders. The explosion of transparency practices, many of which we take for granted today, all date to 1965-75. (This includes that how elected legislators vote in Congress came to be more fully public in 1971, that consumers were enabled to compare the price-per-unit of supermarket goods or know
a perishable good’s “sell by” date, that the press came to aggressively investigate rather than stenographically report the news,and that doctors learned to tell cancer patients that they have cancer). Even so, efforts toward these changes began in the 1950s. This talk explores how “transparency” became a modern mantra.