Is President Barack Obama less transparent than President George Bush? Even a minimum of research reveals a president who may avoid the White House press corps, but is willing to reach out to journalists from non-mainstream news organizations such as the Huffington Post or the Latino press. There’s already a book weighing in on this and other issues, The Promise: President Obama, Year One by Jonathan Alter (Simon and Schuster, May 2010).
In The Promise, for which Obama sat for hours of interviews, Alter says, “It’s too early to draw definitive conclusions about the president.”
The book, which Alter calls a first draft of history, offers insight into President Obama’s first year, highlighting his leadership style, the many domestic challenges confronting him, and his uneasy relationship with the media.
According to The Promise: “Obama worked on the theory that being so accessible at the top—he was on TV more than any of his predecessors—compensated for his tight control over those under him. But history suggested that whenever the White House battened down the media hatches, water eventually came through anyway, and with much greater force.”
A brouhaha erupted over this issue of transparency recently when the Carol Pardun, president of the Association of Educators of Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC), issued a statement criticizing the Obama administration’s “lack of transparency.” Titled “Obama’s Promised ‘Change’ Lacks Transparency,” her statement said, in part, that Obama had broken a record set by his predecessor by allowing a 10-month gap between presidential press conferences before he held one on May 27. The previous one was July 22, 2009.
The AEJMC, a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals, said that it “is alarmed by restrictions to presidential coverage that at best curtail and at worst prevent U.S. citizens from understanding the critical issues in which this administration is involved.”
“We urge President Obama and members of his administration to fulfill the commitment ‘to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government’ described in his memo,” the AEJMC president wrote. Obama’s memo is posted on http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/transparencyandopengovernment/
