
Imperfectly Clear
Transparency is now such a venerated public good in America you’d suspect that—like the Grand Canyon and three-card monte—it has always been with us. But no, writes Michael Schudson in his learned history The Rise of the Right to Know. Transparency, it turns out, is only about as old as rock ’n’ roll (though, as is the case with rock ’n’ roll, its champions can point to historical precursors that gave it its form). Given this hint, you might then guess that transparency—and its bureaucratic manifestation, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)—was conjured into being by the civil-rights movement