CONWAY, N.H. (AP) – The news media are partly to blame for an increase in government secrecy because reporters in the Washington press corps often are complicit, said Andy Alexander, Washington bureau chief for Cox Newspapers.

“We operate mostly from a culture of anonymity,” Alexander said Friday at a media conference on the public’s right to know about the workings of government. “There are people who like secret documents, they like talking to people on background.”

Most news organizations and universities also fail to educate young reporters about the federal Freedom of Information Act and state open records and meetings laws, he said.

News editors need to educate reporters and urge them to file more freedom of information requests, he told the New England Associated Press News Executives Association.

They also need to report on their findings in ways that matter to real people, such as writing about a citizen’s struggle to find out through government records about toxic chemicals in the dump near her home, he said.

The Bush administration is one of the most secretive in modern times, and since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal classification machine has gone into overdrive, he said.

Now, instead of assuming that the Freedom of Information Act requires disclosure of records unless there’s a specific justification for keeping them closed, most federal agencies require anyone requesting records to demonstrate that they should be released, he said.

The news media has begun pushing back, though, said Alexander, who also serves as chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Thanks to lobbying by media organizations, Congress is considering strengthening the Freedom of Information Act and passing a federal shield law that would protect reporters who refuse to give up their notes and confidential sources.

“We’re involved truly in an epic struggle. We are not winning, but we are starting on the road to not losing,” Alexander said.

Several editors said they wanted to pursue an aggressive policy of challenging every denial, but were hampered by the high cost of legal action.

Pat Stith, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., said that once state and local government officials know a news organization will go to court every time, it rarely has to. Reporters should be armed with a handbook on their state’s public access laws and ask every government official who refuses a records request to show them where the law allows the record to be kept secret, he said.

“We’ll sue over public records, and every public official in our state who can read knows it,” Stith said. “We’ve sued so many times that now we don’t have to.”

On the other hand, “If you allow public officials to push your newspaper around, word quickly spreads, it will demoralize your staff and it will embolden officials who don’t want to obey the law,” he said.

Russell Carollo, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, part of the Cox chain, said newspapers should persist in reporting their findings, even when their readers don’t support their mining of public records.

Many readers in Dayton, home to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, were outraged at a series he wrote on crimes committed by U.S. troops against Iraqi civilians. But he felt no need to apologize.

“Sometimes you have to educate people,” he said, after his speech. “Why should we feel guilty about writing the truth?”