Note: This is one in a series of articles in the SPJ Colorado Pro 2015 Sunshine Week project. Sunshine Week is March 15-21.

By Kris Kodrich

We spend much time in my international mass communication class at Colorado State University talking about Freedom of Information in all forms – from the ability to access information to the right to express your opinion without fear of retaliation.

As part of an exercise where my students get together and discuss the cultural privileges we have here in the United States, they often list the protections offered by the First Amendment at the top.

Kris Kodrich

Not everyone around the world is so lucky.

From censorship to outright killings, journalists are under siege around the world.

In its 2015 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters without Borders finds significant deterioration in freedom of information around the world. “Beset by wars, the growing threat from non-state operatives, violence during demonstrations and the economic crisis, media freedom is in retreat on all five continents.”

My students and I talk about the 61 journalists killed around the world in 2014 because of their work – Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine being the most dangerous. We talk about journalists like Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff being beheaded by the monstrous ISIS group in the Middle East.

Already in the first two months of 2015, 16 journalists around the world have been killed for doing their job, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Eight of those were killed in the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.

Some 221 journalists are imprisoned around the world, with China holding the dreadful lead with 44 journalists jailed in 2014.

Here in the United States, journalists, thankfully, usually don’t have to worry about such threats. But journalists still occasionally go to jail for anything from not revealing sources to covering protests a bit too closely than police would like. And I still recall my first managing editor talking about working years earlier on a special investigative team of journalists investigating the car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Dan Bolles in 1976.

When students talk about the role of journalism in a free society, they know it’s a vital one. While we debate the work of groups like WikiLeaks and reporters/documentarians Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras over government secrets and spying, there is general consensus about the value and importance of the journalistic work that brings government misdeeds to light.

Fortunately, the First Amendment provides broad protections for anyone seeking and disseminating information. In the reporting skills classes I teach, I stress Freedom of Information is most valuable when it is used. We have laws to protect access to information because such access is fundamental to a free and open democratic society. A representative government depends on informed citizens.

But we have to remember to use it.

So we discuss how to use FOI to keep a watch on government and public institutions, including the university.

I remind students of how a few years ago the CSU Board of Governors secretly selected the system’s first chancellor and it took an effort by three news media organization in the state to get a judge to order the board to follow the law and turn over all the records of the secret proceedings. It’s the public’s right to know what goes on in public institutions.

Without access to public records and information, we wouldn’t know the millions of dollars that go toward coaches’ salaries at the university. We wouldn’t know the costs of new construction projects on campus. We wouldn’t know the details of how a planned new stadium keeps moving ahead despite considerable opposition. And even though CSU is a safe campus, without access to police records, we might not know when crimes do occur.

Students and their families pay tuition and taxes to help support the university. They along with everyone else in this state need to know how their money is spent and what goes on here. Just last semester, the student government held secret hearings and impeached an elected senator. The student newspaper and the public were shut out of the meeting. On my office door hangs a two-page explanation of “Why Colorado Sunshine Law Covers the Student Government at CSU,” written by Jeffrey Roberts, executive director of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. I smile when I occasionally see a student stop to read it.

FOI does matter. Whether it’s a longtime professional journalist being able to do his or her job safely on the other side of the world, or a student journalist seeking public information from the university, Freedom of Information is something we all vigorously need to defend.

Kris Kodrich teaches journalism at Colorado State University. A longtime journalist, he is the Society of Professional Journalists’ State Sunshine Chair for Colorado. He also is a Colorado representative of Reporters without Borders.