Campaigning freedom of information journalist Heather Brooke is at last getting the recognition she deserves for her five year fight to make MPs' expenses public. There is a big piece by her today headlined "Unsung Hero" in The Guardian.
There are some very telling quotes about how she feels about her campaign versus chequebook journalism.
"After all my hard work, the story of MPs' expenses did, of course, go to the Daily Telegraph. Extensive effort poring over documents? No. It was offered the disc containing the raw data, some say for money. Last Friday the stories began to pour forth.
"As a campaigner I was thrilled to see the details finally put into the public domain. This is important information that the public have a right to see. But as a journalist, I was livid. I asked myself - what is the point of doing all that work, going to court, setting a legal precedent, dealing in facts, when every part of the government conspires to reward the hacks who do none of these things?"
She says of the Telegraph:"But I don't begrudge the paper. It is getting the story out in the most cost-effective way possible. What's unforgivable is that the House of Commons repeatedly obstructed legitimate requests and then delayed the expense publication date and that MPs went so far as to try to exempt themselves from their own law.
"I wonder, too, how much we would have actually seen if we'd waited for the Commons to publish, given that MPs were given a free hand to black out anything that was "personal" or a danger to their "security". These terms have been so overused by MPs that I've no doubt that items such as cleaning the moat would have been removed for "security" reasons, as would the house-flipping scandal, as an invasion of MPs' privacy."
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