As Porlezza (2016) pointed out, the digitalisation of public information allows, on the one hand, making public information available for the citizens and, on the other, monitoring the activities of public administrations, thus giving rise to models of open government. As Meijer and colleagues (2012) argue, the phenomenon of open government goes beyond the opportunity of data availabilityand involves the dialogue and the interaction between citizens and public administrations.
With the development of open government,journalists have the opportunity to deal with new issues and problems in a deeper manner, in line with the data journalism model(Antenore & Splendore, 2017; Giorgino, 2017; Porlezza & Splendore, 2019). In this context, journalists play the essential role of monitors of public administration activities, making use of data reporting and data analysis techniques (Felle, 2015).
In Italy, the legislative decree 97/2016 has introduced the right to generalised civic access to information for any citizen in front of any public administration, and the Autorità Nazionale Anticorruzione [Anti-Corruption National Authority], in collaboration with the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali [National Data Protection Authority], has released some guidelines on this issue in 2016.
Recently, a number of civic associations have complained about the complexities of the procedures that grant citizens the right to generalised civic access to information. In particular, some journalistic associations, such as Oxygen for Information, have complained that the rules on transparency of the public administration say nothing explicitly about the request for access that may come from a journalist. Given that journalists have certain prerogatives in the processing of personal data for reporting purposes enshrined in the data protection legislation, some indications on the effective exercise of the right to generalised civic access laid down by the Anti-Corruption National Authority and Italian data protection authority guidelines – applicable to all activities and therefore also to journalistic ones – seem to be more stringent than those usually valid for journalists. This is the case of the prerogatives of preventing the disclosure of relevant information by other parties, regulated by these guidelines, but usually not applicable to the personal data processing in journalistic activities in the way it is regulated by the data protection law.
Furthermore, during the Covid-19 pandemic, law decree 18/2020 suspended any proceeding with Italian public administrations, including generalised civic access. According to Transparency Italy representative Laura Carrer (2020),
the citizens and journalists who inform us every day must be able to access to information, a fundamental right especially in situations such as the one we are going through – in which it is difficult to exclude a high risk hidden under the emergency. The right of access is an essential tool for monitoring the transparency and accountability of even the smallest government, regional, and local authorities in the management of events such as this one. The choices and actions of today’s government are in fact fundamental for our future, and we cannot afford to let them take place without the possibility of knowing the content and responsibilities.
