The Right to Know

Stephen Sedley on freedom of information

We are accustomed to finding that we have been lied to. To insure ourselves against such deceptions we repeat the mantra that we don’t believe everything we read in the newspapers. There have been, and must still be, parts of the world where the reputation of the press is such that people don’t believe anything they read in the newspapers: in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s nobody believed that US aircraft were dropping cluster-bombs and napalm on Vietnam because the official newspaper reported daily that they were. Because our experience is less uniformly bad, we tend to give initial credence to what we are told. Yet repeated revelations over recent years that people in whom we put our trust have been lying not only to the media but to Parliament and the courts have shaken our confidence in our own scepticism.