Obama's Transparency Outlook: Still Hazy

The Columbia Journalism Review's Clint Hendler grades President Obama's delivery so far on his promises of greater transparency. Obama earns an A–, his best grade, for opening up White House visitor records, which Bush treated as confidential. He gets his worst grade, F, for continuing off-the-record briefings by "senior administration officials" who must remain nameless even when they are announcing official policy and even when they turn around and say the same things on TV. Hendler notes that "Scott McClellan, Bush's press secretary from 2003 to 2006, said the practice didnt make much sense to him, and decided not to conduct them." Obama gets a D+ and D, respectively, for his efforts to put agency data online and for his use of the "state secrets" privilege, which seems pretty similar to Bush's despite a new internal review procedure.