Jeffrey Daniels began his career as a political reporter, later becoming the press secretary for Ella T. Grasso as she ran for governor of Connecticut in 1974. Once Grasso was elected, Daniels transitioned to a role as the special assistant for policy and programs, where he helped develop legislation for the state’s first Freedom of Information Act, one of Grasso’s campaign promises.
Daniels currently serves as the legislative co-chair of the Connecticut Council for Open Government.
Interviewed by Ben Martin, SCSU JRN ‘25. Answers have been condensed and edited.
How did you develop your interest in freedom of information?
When I covered the State House as a reporter, there was resistance to getting information. When you would go and ask for documents, you felt almost like you were, I wouldn’t say begging, but you were pleading to get information. And it was at the whim of any particular individual or official, whether they would provide you with the information. There was no context, no formal statutory obligation that set out the rules.
Meetings also were not consistently public. And so, I had a history of probably four or five years of working as a basic reporter, just trying to get information.
What motivated Gov. Ella Grasso to start working to pass the Freedom of Information Act?
The commitment to do it both publicly and in her own mind, she had said was an important thing that the government or a municipal government ought to have. It was basically a promise.
Second, it had been championed by virtually every print editorial board in the state. At that time there were 28 daily newspapers, a very different time. Every one of them had issued some kind of an advocacy to have that kind of legislation and to support its passage. So that was a second element.
And the third, I think there were some folks in the legislature who shared the same view that opening up government and its records by an imposed form of statute would be a fairly good thing to do. There was support from organizations like Common Cause, and the Connecticut Citizens Action Group, a number of advocacy organizations.
Do you think the current FOI law in Connecticut reflects the intentions when the act was created?
The original legislation had four exemptions for the release of public information. There are now 28. And so, there’s been a rather large particular growth in creating exemptions to the act itself. Generally, that’s not good, because it means the breadth of things that are excluded from public information has been growing.
Some of those potentially are useful and may have been important, but the total trend of having more exemptions is not particularly good. So, the original act was more narrowly cast in keeping more things in the open. And it was stronger because of that.
The piece that is the same, and the uniqueness of the Connecticut Act, was the creation of the Freedom of Information Commission and putting a group of volunteer commissioners on it, backed up by staff to actually allow the public, both press and the general public, to seek an appeal if they were denied information.
And that’s still very vigorous and very strong. The act has in fact strengthened their capacity in some ways. Their legislation two years ago was to increase and to write in positions of fines. The capacity to do fines was very heavily argued in the original legislation and did not come out very strong.
Do you have any advice for current journalists on navigating the Freedom of Information Act?
Well, the necessity for persistence is still there. So, you need to go in as a member of the public or the press, with the perspective that the information should be and is open to the press and to the public.
And coming from that perspective, and when folks quickly perhaps say, “I think that’s exempt or that’s not something that you’re entitled to have,” you need to be persistent and continue to urge that you get it.
The second piece was there is a formalized process, particularly in state government as well as local. You file a formal request for the information, and that triggers an effort and a clock starts running on providing that information.
And then I think increasingly, people are still going to the commission as a kind of administrative arbiter to try to decide things. The best advice I would give is to just basically insist that the burden is on the government to prove and say that this information shouldn’t be public.
