From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. This week, public radio stations across the country are collaborating in a project called Whose Democracy Is It? Since the whole enterprise of democracy depends on an informed electorate,

we decided to spend this hour on the state of play between media and democracy

in 2003. Abraham Lincoln once said, let the people know the facts and the country will be safe.

So that's what we're asking today. Are the facts out there? And if not, why not?

Scott Armstrong is an investigative reporter who has served as liaison between journalists

and government groups on the issue of leaks.

He sees a serious blockage in the information flow, and he joins me now.

Scott, welcome back.

Nice to be here.

So Thomas Jefferson once said, where it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. I mean, come on, he wasn't serious, was he?

Well, he was quite serious. And in fact, from the very founding of our country, the relationship between the newspapers and the Congress was symbiotic.

The newspapers originally published what the Congress did as their official records, and they

published what they thought of it. And what were the respective roles of the media and the Congress?

Well, as time developed, the media became essentially the hammer that would use Congress as an anvil to beat points out and say this is what is going on, and Congress would then examine it.

On other occasions, the Congress became the hammer, and the media would be an anvil.

But there was always a relationship of one being able to strike the other and being able to shape the public understanding of things.

Woodrow Wilson in 1885 said that the Congress's primary function is to inform the public,

not to legislate, that informing was much more fundamental than legislating.

So how are the Anvil and the hammer proceeding today, flash forward to 2003?

Well, right now we're swinging the media hammer and it's just flying through the air.

...