Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

Tapscott's Copy Desk is the new weblog of Heritage's Mark Tapscott.

Tapscott is director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at Heritage, a longtime journalist and media critic, and an expert on FOIA and government information.

Tapscott asks in his first post, can the Blogosphere do for government what it has done for the mainstream media? We think this is the most important bit:

[T]he Internet is sparking an explosion of publicly available data from government at all levels and putting it in the hands of millions of citizens, journalists, political and community activists, academics and think-tank experts with the skills to make sense of the numbers. Government officials can no longer control the means of measuring the success or failure of public policies.
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How long before vast networks of Internet-savvy citizen analysts apply the same immense fact-checking power to pork-laden government programs as the emerging Blogosphere is now doing with Big Media? Then the Freedom of Information Act will have real muscle.

How long? We fear it could be a while. After all, incentives at all levels of government are perfectly contrary to this end: Why release information when it will only cause controversy or funding cuts? Tapscott knows, more than most, the extremes to which bureaucrats will go when threatened with having to release information to the public.

And while some in Congress might be sympathetic to the cause of accountability, how many are willing to vote that way? When pet programs are at stake, rationalizations multiply. We know people who could dream up major national security reasons not to release information on Gettysburg, Pennsylvania's "Therapeutic Horse Man Ship Center." (Whatever that is, it got $175,000 from Washington last year.)

And what will be the Blogosphere's effect if all this information does come out? Last year, we did some investigative work of our own to figure out why Sen. Charles Grassley wanted hundreds of millions of dollars to build a rainforest in a cornfield. Others wrote about it, too--even a few well known weblogs. No great surprise, the rain forest installation proceeds on schedule, dissents duly ignored. No more objectionable piece of pork comes immediately to mind.

A major part of the problem is that the government doesn't play the same game as the media, which despite all manner of regulation still works for a paycheck. The government, however, operates without regard to public demand and often oblivious to public sentiment. Public choice theory explains a lot of how the government makes decisions that often go against the voting public's will, though the solutions it currently offers are often impracticable.

As Tapscott describes, "the Blogosphere has ended Big Media?s monopoly on deciding what is news and how it should be covered." But bloggers, working alone, are unlikely to have a similarly outsized effect on big government.

But that's no reason to keep information bottled up; rather, it points to a different role for bloggers. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation work to change the incentives in Washington so that politicians and bureaucrats make better choices that hew to traditional American values and expand freedom. Budget process reform, one of our major issues, is an obvious example. With more information, we can produce better research and, working with interested parties like bloggers, shift the substance of debate.

There is a major role for the Blogosphere in reforming the way Washington does business, but it may be as part of a larger movement. And that's what we're trying to do right here, on this weblog, isn't it?

Anyway, Mark, welcome!