The most vexing phenomenon I encountered in my recent reporting on Obama’s Web team was the insistence by Obama press folks that everyone inside the transition team speak on background, with quotes attributable only to unnamed “Obama aides.” At first it reminded me of the way certain corporate PR departments — hello, Google — tacitly infantilize their employees by shadowing every interview, under the presumption that even executives aren’t smart enough to resist blabbing away the company goods.
Upon further reflection, though, the Obama policy seemed even more baffling. After all, they didn’t stop people from speaking to me. In fact, they kindly arranged some interviews. They just wouldn’t let those people put their name behind their (completely uncontroversial) words. More to the point, however, I was actually interviewing these people about transparency, which led to unintentionally ironic anonymice like this:
“Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”
Important, but not so important as to warrant putting an actual person’s name behind the statement. To top it off, the Obama aide didn’t even seem to want to remain anonymous. They just didn’t want to break the rules. Even stranger, some of those same people have since spoken in public forums and made the exact statements which I was forced to keep un-attributed.
As Jack Schaffer points out today at Slate, this sort of knee-jerk impulse toward anonymity is also afoot in White House press “background briefings.” At the very least, an administration promising to be the most transparent in history should be required to offer an explanation for the policy, and probably discard it altogether, save for especially sensitive circumstances. It would be a good first step in creating a “presumption of openness.”
Posted at 12:02 pm | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
Comments
Leave a Reply
