Obama Promises Better Transparency—Should We Believe It?
The White House, which has been criticized for freezing out the press and the public, has announced a plan to get better.
The Obama administration this month released its second blueprint for making the federal government more transparent, two years after the initial plan was announced.
The new plan includes a range of proposals to give the public more information about how the government operates. Those proposals include improving the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and declassifying some national security documents.
Open-government advocates were not impressed.
“A lot of things in the plan are things the White House had already committed to do elsewhere,” said Ginger McCall, federal policy manager for the Sunlight Foundation. “And a lot of it is vague. The best you can be about this plan is cautiously optimistic.”
Discontent is nothing new for people—transparency advocates and prominent journalists among them—who have called the Obama administration one of history’s most secretive.
Government agencies have been criticized for stonewalling even routine FOIA requests, delaying responses for months or years, or refusing outright to release information. News photographers, including the director of photography for the world's oldest news organization, have expressed anger at the White House’s unprecedented limits on photos of the president.
In October a report from the Committee to Protect Journalists noted the administration’s crackdown on leaks within the federal government, which has asked employees to report coworkers suspected of passing on information to the press and prosecuted journalists for refusing to divulge sources.
“It’s having a deterrent effect,” New York Times reporter Scott Shane told the report’s author, former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr. “If we consider aggressive press coverage of government activities being at the core of American democracy, this tips the balance heavily in favor of the government.”
Federal agencies should continue—and accelerate—their recent efforts to digitize documents, said Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.
“The push to send more documents to the Internet, so you don’t even have to request them—that’s the direction we have to go,” he said. “When we’re talking about transparency, that’s what we should be talking about.”
The White House needs to go further than its latest plan does and make real changes, McCall said. The public needs more information about how federal money is spent, especially in regard to political campaigns and lobbying, she said.
The federal government's online statistics on FOIA requests—e.g., how many received and denied—only date to 2008 and fail to shed light on how the Obama administration compares to past presidencies.
However, McCall says it's disappointingly clear that the Obama administration is “no better than George W. Bush’s administration.”
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• Retro Action, June 13, 1971: Decades Before WikiLeaks, 'New York Times' Publishes Pentagon Papers
• Just How Serious Is Obama's Crackdown on Media Leaks?
Original article from TakePart
