NOTED: Advancing storm clouds darken ‘Sunshine Week’

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Let’s start with a thought experiment: How would you feel if you and your neighbors were barred from attending meetings of your town’s elected governing boards? And what if reporters were excluded, too?

Now, hold that thought.

Welcome, Berkshire Argus readers, to “Sunshine Week,” the annual opportunity for journalists across the nation to shine light on government transparency, access to public records, and the importance of a free, independent press that can report out that information without fear or favor.

This week’s name comes from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote, in 1914, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” That sentence appeared in his book, “Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use it,” a sharp critique of corporate power, concentrated wealth, and investment bankers, in particular. He called for closely scrutinizing those with wealth and power “as a continuous remedial measure” against their influence.

Two years after the book’s publication, Brandeis, a successful public-interest lawyer from Boston, was elevated to the high court by President Woodrow Wilson.

This year, Sunshine Week occurs at a time of rising concern over press freedom and the free flow of information about the activities of the federal government.

Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has helped accelerate an expansive and multifaceted effort to undermine independent nonpartisan media. He’s worked to memory-hole history, erase vital information, and flood the zone with a ceaseless torrent of lies and misinformation.

Echoing tactics of authoritarians present and past, he’s deployed inaccurate and purposefully deceitful information as the basis for emergency declarations, and issued inflammatory executive orders heavy on conjecture but light on facts. He’s also usurped power through unconstitutional assaults on the federal government and the separation of powers, and fired seventeen inspectors general tasked with independent oversight.

All the while, he and his administration have attacked the press, filing and threatening lawsuits and launching coercive “investigations” that seek to regulate media outlets through fear and intimidation.

As detailed by the New York Times journalist David Enrich in his exhaustively reported new book, “Murder the Truth,” it’s part of a years-long campaign by Trump, tech billionaires, and conservative legal activists—including those associated with Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s return to the White House—to erode trust in journalism.

They also aim to roll back longstanding Supreme Court precedents like New York Times Company v. Sullivan that provide essential protections for investigative, public-interest journalism. Their goal is to force reporters and news organizations to self-censor in the face of legal and financial pressure—to “obey in advance,” a phrase more commonly associated with those living under authoritarian regimes.

Because it’s the reporting of facts—based on government documents and credible sources, not opinion, conspiracy theories, or unverified claims—that ensures accountability. It does so by shining Brandeis’s metaphorical sunlight into the halls of wealth and corridors of power.

While the national situation is alarming, Sunshine Week also focuses on the need for local and state government transparency. In Massachusetts, that means exploring pressing questions like the pending renewal of hybrid-remote options for public meetings; whether the legislature will continue to block a detailed audit of its operations that was approved by voters last fall; and long-sought improvements to open-meeting and public-records laws.

Indeed, the Commonwealth remains one of only two states—the other is Michigan—that exempts both the legislature and governor’s office from public-records law. And it’s the only state where the legislature, governor and judiciary all say they are exempt, blocking access to documents and information about their decision-making.

Clearly, compared to the other forty-nine states, Massachusetts can do better. But the arc of history is long, and some things have certainly improved over time thanks to open-meeting and public-records laws—even if many believe they are insufficient.

Consider a little-known story from the Berkshires that’s particularly timely for this year’s Sunshine Week. It begins with an acknowledgement that Select Board meetings in our region are typically uneventful and often dull—no offense to those involved. Not always, of course, but they rarely provide high-octane entertainment or devolve into shouting matches. (That may be a good thing; there’s the people’s business to attend to, after all.)

But inside Great Barrington Town Hall in the nineteen thirties, the tone was far from staid. It was a time when those elected to the three-person governing board were called “the town fathers” for their lofty position and numerous authorities—and, of course, because they were always men.

Newspapers like south county’s Berkshire Courier, the county-wide Eagle, and even the Springfield Republican covered the board’s weekly meetings with detailed, blow-by-blow reporting. And their journalists didn’t shy away from noting when tempers flared or accusations of corruption were leveled.

In May, 1938, after yet another contentious clash between Selectmen James F. Tracy and Paul C. White—who frequently accused each other of malfeasance and backroom deal-making—Chairman Edward R. Williams, frustrated by press coverage of his colleagues’ latest dispute, pushed the board to act. In a two-to-one vote, with White opposed, the board barred reporters and the public from its meetings, except for required public hearings. Only those with official business before the board could attend.

“MOVED: That admission to meetings of the [Great Barrington] Board of Selectmen be hereafter restricted to those persons who have matters pending before the board.”

—The motion approved by a vote of 2-1 on May 9, 1938.

Unrestricted access to its meetings was over. As the Berkshire Eagle reported in its final dispatch from inside the Selectmen’s room, “The public will in the future know only what the board cares to announce.”

The controversy that led to the ban had been brewing for a few weeks. Williams accused a Courier reporter of writing news stories that he said were more “interpretive” than fact-based. The paper had also misattributed a quote.

At the same time, Williams had—remarkably, by today’s journalistic standards—asked reporters not to write about one particularly heated exchange between his colleagues. It must have been a barnburner: A letter in the Courier from someone present said, “One member of the board accused another of ‘taking care of his friends,’” and noted “the back-talk became so torrid that the papers could not print the details for lack of asbestos paper!”

To smooth things over, the Courier published several mea culpas. It corrected the misattribution and reaffirmed that commentary would be restricted to its editorial page. But with rising authoritarianism and the storm clouds of war darkening the European continent, the editor of the Courier also said the Select Board’s new policy seemed dangerously close to the censorship tactics of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Still, he suggested that such comparisons might be “carrying things a little too far.”

Yet the parallel—and the timing—is worth noting. On May 9, 1938, the very day Great Barrington’s board voted to close its meetings, Hitler was concluding a week-long trip to Italy, solidifying the alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy under Mussolini. Both dictators had already crushed the independent press in their countries—and in Austria, which Germany had just invaded.

A few weeks earlier, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had also increased restrictions on foreign correspondents, subjecting them to constant surveillance and issuing daily talking points to be echoed in their filed reports. Any negative coverage of Hitler or the Nazi regime meant immediate expulsion—or worse.

Indeed, during that same week in May, Carl von Ossietzky, the courageous German journalist repeatedly imprisoned for exposing Germany’s secret rearmament in violation of the treaty that ended World War One, died in a concentration camp after suffering years of mistreatment. (In 1935, while in prison, Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.)

How much these world events influenced Great Barrington voters’ thoughts on local government transparency and freedom of the press is unclear. Though at the time, international news and the rise of fascism was featured prominently in the Eagle and discussed in its opinion columns and letters to the editor. The paper ran several Associated Press stories about Hitler’s May, 1938, trip to Italy on its front page.

In any event, the Select Board’s policy of secrecy and closed meetings became a central issue in the next municipal election, held in February, 1939. With a hat tip to Justice Brandeis, White issued a pre-election pamphlet that restated his view: “I am in favor of Selectmen’s meeting[s] attended by the press,” he wrote, adding, “Just as sunlight kills germs, so would publicity have prevented many of the happenings of the past year.”

Williams, the board chair who proposed closing the meetings, was ousted by James O. McCarty by just twenty-three votes out of 2,500 cast. Tracy, who had also voted to close the board’s meetings, was re-elected—and with the most votes.

The newly constituted board, with Tracy as chair, voted immediately to reopen its meetings to the press and public, closing a little-known chapter of Great Barrington history.

The section of Brandeis’s book that includes his now-famous line about sunlight is titled, “What Publicity Can Do.” During this year’s Sunshine Week, as new storm clouds gather over our constitutional republic and a free, independent press is threatened, it’s vital to prevent backsliding in government transparency at all levels—and to preserve and protect journalism that exposes what those in power would prefer remained hidden.

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