Ralph Nader Blasts GPO
Ralph Nader’s Center for Study of Responsive Law released a report on the Government Printing Office that stresses the shortfalls of a GPO, which focuses on online information at the expense of print media.
“With government information increasingly moving online, unconnected Americans are being left behind," noted Nader, who is known for his refusal to use a computer or read from an e-book. "These people are often the most vulnerable and isolated members of our society—the poor, the elderly, and the rural.”
A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report last week draws attention to the fact that 19 million Americans live in areas of the country that don’t have access to high-speed internet. A 2012 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project that shows 22 percent of Americans over the age of 18 don’t use the internet. This equates to 50 million people.
“For over 150 years, since President Abraham Lincoln took office, the Government Printing Office has played a vital role in disseminating information about the government to Americans. As the GPO moves information online, the digital divide between connected and unconnected Americans is widening.
“This threatens the GPO’s self-proclaimed mission to ‘keep America informed. The GPO provides a range of information including information useful to consumers, about ongoing government activities, about public health, public services, citizen access to their government agencies and departments, and government reports, among other things,’” said Nader.
In a story on the Government Executive website, GPO offered this defense: “As the information needs of Congress, federal agencies and the public have changed, GPO has embraced technological innovations to meet those needs as efficiently and economically as possible. Like all other agencies in this era of budget limits, we are striving to do more with less, and we continue to explore and incorporate new technologies to carry out our mission.”
The GPO’s efforts to put an increasing amount of government information available online takes a huge step forward in making this information more accessible than ever to Americans with internet access. Over 13 million documents are retrieved from GPO’s online services each month, and this number is growing.
An unfortunate consequence of the shift away from print media, however, is that Americans who remain offline are increasingly disconnected from their government. The report, titled “The Peoples’ Printer: Time for a Reawakening,” by Tom W. Ryan with Jeff Musto, paints a troubling picture of who is being left behind:
- 32.1 percent of Americans making less than $15,000 per year had high-speed internet access in their home, compared to nearly 90 percent of Americans making $150,000 or more annually.
- 49 percent of black Americans and 51 percent of hispanic Americans have access to broadband internet at home, compared to 66 percent of white Americans.
- 94 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 were internet users, while only 41 percent of Americans 65 years or older were.
In the past few decades, the GPO has moved much of the information it provides online, printed less, and outsourced more of its printing work. This has resulted in fewer employees, lower sales, fewer physical document requests, and consumers were confronted with skyrocketing prices for print publications. Some costs have increased five-fold.
