NEWSPAPERS ACROSS the state and nation will observe “Sunshine Sunday” tomorrow, celebrating openness in government and decrying its absence. But the greatest beneficiaries of open meetings and open records aren’t newspapers, which can find plenty to fill their pages even in the face of official secrecy. The greatest beneficiaries — and the greatest victims of secret government — are average citizens.

It’s average citizens who can now find out more about complaints against their physician, thanks to a new law the General Assembly passed last year. It’s average citizens who can’t find out if their veterinarian has a history of killing cats in other states, thanks to that same Legislature’s refusal to more broadly open up professional disciplinary records.

Open records laws let people find out about crime sprees in their neighborhoods and how much homes sell for in the neighborhoods they’re thinking of moving to. They let you check the sanitation rating of your favorite restaurant and the test scores at your middle school.

Open meetings laws force county councils to have (eventually) a public debate before they spend millions of tax dollars building a private baseball stadium. They force legislators to decide in public how much they’ll spend on public schools and prison guards and nursing homes (that is, unless legislators make those decisions in the House Republican Caucus meeting, and have armed state employees stand guard outside their locked doors to keep the public out).

When they work, open government laws keep government officials honest and give citizens the information they need to decide whether those officials should remain on the job. We in the media try to make sure those laws work — that is, that officials obey them. And we try to make sure that the laws are strengthened rather than weakened. We’ve got a vested interest in doing that. But so do you. And without your support, there’s little we can do to make sure our government remains awash in the disinfectant of sunshine.