Freedom of information, provided you can pay for it

Balkinization has a great post about the ACLU's role in prying documents out of the government.

The torture story is one of the most important examples of American journalism in the last decade. But it was not revealed through traditional investigative reporting alone. Instead, a non-profit organization-- the ACLU--worked in coordination with journalistic efforts to mount a long-term litigation campaign to gain access to important government information. The ACLU then provided the information to the general public on the Internet, and journalists wrote stories based on the revelations, which led to further ACLU requests and more litigation, producing further revelations, and so on.

It is unlikely that many newspapers today--strapped as they are for cash--would have been able to mount a litigation campaign of many years as expensive or as effective as the ACLU did in order to obtain information for a story.