{"id":130579,"date":"2026-07-30T05:03:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T11:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uswps06.newsmemory.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/2026\/07\/30\/opinion-20260729-0326-459882\/?destination=northern-plains-independent"},"modified":"2026-07-30T05:11:15","modified_gmt":"2029-01-15T05:11:15","slug":"opinion-20260729-0326-459882","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/2026\/07\/30\/opinion-20260729-0326-459882\/?destination=northern-plains-independent","title":{"rendered":"Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Montanans rightly take pride in our Constitution\u2019s robust right to know. But as we\u2019ve said before, a constitutional  guarantee is only as meaningful as the process available to enforce it. Our state\u2019s enforcement mechanism  is lax, despite recent efforts  to change public records laws. The result is a system in which the responsibility to gain information falls on the shoulders of records requestors<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"news-destination":[14],"news-source":[11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130718,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130579\/revisions\/130718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130579"},{"taxonomy":"news-destination","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-destination?post=130579"},{"taxonomy":"news-source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernplainsindependent.com\/northernplainsindependent\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-source?post=130579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}