Our inquiry began with the recognition that a democratic polity presupposes meaningful linkages between governmental institutions, the political elites who staff such institutions, and the mass public that is governed by these institutions. In the American context such linkages are most readily seen, perhaps, in the systematic operation of free and open elections that, the theory goes, make the institutions and the elites who govern through them “accountable” to the mass public. One key ingredient in this recipe for the democratic brew, of course, is the recognition that a free flow of meaningful information is critical for the mass public if their efforts at assessing governmental behavior and assuring accountability have any hope of being the product of informed and reasoned judgments.