Earl English testified extensively before numerous Senate committees in the 1950s and ‘60s on the need for FOIA. He vigorously pushed the Missouri congressional delegation, particularly Sen. Edward Long, to pass the necessary legislation.

English was named by former American Society of Newspaper Editors President James Pope in 1978 as one of the four leaders – along with Rep. John Moss, Harold Cross and Paul Fisher – whose contributions were crucial to the development of the freedom of information movement.

A strong believer in the importance of journalism education, English became dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Finding it natural that a journalism educator would take special interest in the fight for access to government records, he founded the university’s Freedom of Information Center in 1958. What, he asked, was the point of training reporters to look for information, if the information itself were not made available

Earl English died in 2000.

A key member of the House Government Operations Committee and the Government Information Subcommittee, Rep. Dante Fascell, D-Fla., worked with Rep. John Moss to wring concessions from the executive branch during the time FOIA was being developed and adopted.

A champion of Sunshine Laws, he consistently fought for the preservation of FOIA throughout his career and spearheaded legislation to open House committee meetings to the public. In 1984 he helped pass a law to open executive agency meetings as well.

Dante Fascell died in 1998.

Paul Fisher was director of the University of Missouri Freedom of Information Center for 31 years, retiring in 1989. A protégé of Earl English, the center’s founder, Fisher worked with English to persuade Missouri senators to vote for FOIA legislation.

As head of the center, he established freedom of information as an academic study and opened the Washington office of the university’s FOI Center. He hired Samuel J. Archibald as the first Washington director. He also taught a number of groundbreaking courses on the subject of FOI, courses one former student credits as “the best I ever had in undergrad or graduate school, courses which made me look behind the news, at peoples’ motivations.”

Fisher died March 17, 2009.

Former editor of The Denver Post, ASNE president (1979-80) and chairman of ASNE’s FOI Committee (1973-75), William Hornby worked with Ed Murray to put pressure on Congress during the 1974 fight for added FOIA legislation, leading the successful effort to override President Gerald Ford’s veto.

Hornby helped spur editorials and news stories in over 50 newspapers throughout the country, many of which were posted in congressional committee rooms.

Jane E. Kirtley is the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. She is also Director of The Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law and an affiliated faculty member at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Kirtley speaks frequently on media law and ethics issues in the United States and abroad. She has been principal speaker for the “Privacy and Data Protection” panel at the Practising Law Institute’s annual Communications Law in the Digital Age conference for more than 10 years. 

Kirtley has also lectured before meetings of the Media Law Resource Center, National Foundation for Judicial Excellence, the Canadian Media Lawyers Association (Ad IDEM), UNESCO (Paris) and many state bar associations, as well as countless journalism groups such as the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Associated Collegiate Press. She has been the recipient of multiple Speaker and Specialist grants from the U.S. Department of State, most recently to Brazil in Spring 2019.

Kirtley has written friend of the court briefs in media law and Freedom of Information Act cases, as well as articles and chapters on media law and media ethics for scholarly journals and the popular and professional press. In 2010, her Media Law handbook was published by the U.S. Department of State and was translated into nine languages. She also co-authored a textbook, Media Ethics Today.

Kirtley was a Fulbright Scholar teaching U.S. media law and media ethics at the University of Latvia’s Law Faculty in Riga during Spring 2016. In 2004, she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 2012, an Adjunct Professor of Law in the London Law Programme for the University of Notre Dame Law School.

Kirtley was Executive Director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for 14 years. Prior to that, she was an attorney with the law firm Nixon, Hargrave, Devans and Doyle in Rochester, N.Y. and Washington, D.C. She is a member of the New York, District of Columbia, and Virginia bars, as well as several federal district and appeals courts and the Supreme Court of the United States. Prof. Kirtley also worked as a reporter for the Evansville (Indiana) Press and The Oak Ridger and Nashville Banner (Tennessee).

She has served on the boards of the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation, the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information, Communication Law and Policy and the Journal of Media Law and Ethics. Prof. Kirtley’s honors include the National Scholastic Press Association’s Pioneer Award, the SPJ-Minnesota Pro Chapter’s Peter S. Popovich Award for Freedom of Information; the Edith Wortman First Amendment Matrix Foundation Award; the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement; the FOI Hall of Fame; and the John Peter Zenger Award for Freedom of the Press and the People’s Right to Know from the University of Arizona. She was a Pulitzer Prize juror in 2015, and was a member of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Silver Gavel Awards from 2018-2020, and is currently a facilitator for the screening committee.

Kirtley received her J.D. degree from Vanderbilt University Law School in 1979, where she was Executive Articles Editor of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. She holds bachelor and master of journalism degrees from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism (1975, 1976).

(Updated April 2025)

An award-winning journalist as well as a lawyer, Jack C. Landau was the first executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, serving from 1974 until 1985.

He helped form the organization in 1970. He was an early and effective advocate for journalists’ access to government information under the Freedom of Information Act, and testified before Congress on several occasions.

In the early ’80s, the Reporters Committee under Landau’s direction assisted in filing more than 600 FOIA requests during one 18-month period and participated in filing a number of legal briefs in access cases. He helped establish the Freedom of Information Service Center.

The journalist began his career with newspapers in New York and went on to work for the Associated Press and The Washington Post in the 1960s, before establishing himself as a U.S. Supreme Court reporter for Newhouse Newspapers.

He served as a spokesman for Attorney General John Mitchell early in the Nixon administration, helping to come up with new rules requiring the attorney general’s approval for a news-media subpoena.

The Reporters Committee lists several noteworthy initiatives during his tenure: a hotline for reporters to call when they faced challenges; a newsletter now known as The News Media & the Law; and advocacy for shield laws to protect reporters from being forced to disclose confidential sources.

Landau died Aug. 9, 2008.

A consistent champion of FOI rights throughout his three-plus decades in the Senate, U.S. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., is considered to be FOIA’s best friend in Congress today.

The principal sponsor of the Electronic FOIA, a 1996 amendment to FOIA that reflected the reality of modern electronic recordkeeping, Leahy has stood strong against attempts by colleagues to narrow FOIA’s scope. In 1981, he led the fight against amendments brought by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, which would have restricted citizen access to certain records, as well as a statute to prevent business from delaying release of non-confidential documents.

Over the years, Leahy has become so identified with FOIA that one press-organization representative quipped that proposing to add his name to a list of honorees is akin to proposing Michael Jordan for the Basketball Hall of Fame.

As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Edward Long, D-Mo., headed the committee that reported out to the Senate the bill that was to become the Freedom of Information Act.

Rep. John E. Moss’ committee had long been working on a bill, which was from the press perspective a better idea, but Moss decided not to risk unfriendly amendments and the House adopted the Senate bill without change. Thus it was Sen. Long’s version of the measure that became law in 1966.

Edward Long died in 1972.

Paul K. McMasters retired in 2007 as the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment ombudsman.

In a long career in news and First Amendment advocacy, McMasters became one of the nation’s leading authorities on First Amendment and freedom-of-information issues. He joined the Freedom Forum in 1992 after 33 years in daily journalism. Beginning in 1995, he served as First Amendment ombudsman, working to educate and inform about First Amendment issues that arise in Congress, the courts, the press and other areas of public life.

As an expert source on all aspects of First Amendment rights and values, in particular free speech, free press, censorship, journalism ethics and access to government information, McMasters was quoted extensively in the press and appeared frequently on NBC’s “Today” show, PBS’s “NewsHour,” CNN’s “Larry King Live,” “Crossfire,” “Burden of Proof” and “Talk Back Live,” MSNBC, CNBC, Fox News Channel and Court TV.

He testified before a number of government commissions and congressional committees, including the House Judiciary Committee; the U.S. Senate Sub-Committee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information; the Moynihan Commission on government secrecy; and the House Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology.

Active in a number of press groups, McMasters served as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, the nation’s largest and most broad-based press organization, and as president of the SDX Foundation, the educational arm of SPJ. He was president of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government from 2002 to 2006. He also served four years as the National Freedom of Information Chair for SPJ.

In addition to the boards of the SDX Foundation and VCOG, he served on the Media Institute First Amendment Advisory Council, the John E. Moss Foundation board of directors, the board of editors for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the editorial board of the Newspaper Research Journal and the Freedom of Information committees of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists.

McMasters began his journalism career at the Springfield, Mo., newspapers in 1960, working his way up to editor of the morning paper over the next 19 years. In 1979, he was named managing editor of The Coffeyville (Kan.) Journal. He went to USA TODAY in 1982 as the national daily was starting up and was serving as associate editor of the editorial page there when he moved to the Freedom Forum in 1992 as executive director of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University.

Among his many awards: The John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger First Amendment Award, presented by the University of Arizona for lifetime achievement in First Amendment and freedom-of-information work, and the Wells Key, the Society of Professional Journalists’ highest honor. He is a charter member of the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame.

Among McMasters’ numerous publications, he wrote a column for the First Amendment Center Online and many articles published in newspapers, magazines, journals and books, including a chapter titled “A First Amendment Perspective on Public Journalism” in Mixed News: The Public/Civic/Communitarian Journalism Debate (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, publisher). His essay, “Free Speech versus Civil Discourse: Where Do We Go From Here?” was selected for inclusion in the college reader, Ten Things Every American Government Student Should Read (Allyn and Bacon).