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Weekly News Digest
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March 23, 2021 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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'Censorship of Federal Environmental Agency Websites Under Trump: What We Learned and How to Protect Public Information Moving Forward'
Gretchen Gehrke, Marcy Beck, Eric Nost, and Shannan Lenke Stoll write the following in a Union of Concerned Scientists blog post:Over the last four years, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) has documented and analyzed changes to federal environmental websites. What our team found was alarming: unprecedented steps by the Trump administration to manipulate information about environmental issues and laws, marked particularly by patterns of removing public information prior to environmental proceedings and censoring climate change-related information on websites. Websites are how federal agencies communicate with the public, and changes to them can impact public participation in environmental regulatory processes. The information that’s available—or unavailable—on federal websites matters for the health of democracy and the environment. Yet there is currently little policy guidance for the governance of information found on federal agencies’ websites. The findings in EDGI’s latest report Access Denied: Federal Web Governance Under the Trump Administration and academic paper Visualizing Changes to US Federal Environmental Agency Websites, 2016–2020 show why this needs to change. For more information, read the blog post.
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Brandi Scardilli
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