What makes the crackdown on leaks, increased denials of Freedom of Information Act requests and surveillance of journalists even more pernicious is how this conduct by President Barack Obama’s administration has taken place as the administration simultaneously uses its own media to pump out its own message.
In a report from the Committee to Protect Journalists on, “The Obama Administration and the Press,” which details leaks investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America, an entire section focuses on the administration’s promise of transparency.
“By the end” of Obama’s “first full day” as president “on January 21, 2009, he had issued directives to government agencies to speed up their responses to Freedom of Information Act requests and to establish ‘Open Government Initiative’ websites with information about their activities and the data they collect,” according to the report authored by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. However, those “government websites turned out to be part of a strategy, honed during Obama’s presidential campaign, to use the Internet to dispense to the public large amounts of favorable information and images generated by his administration, while limiting its exposure to probing by the press.”
The strategy has been a marketing ploy. “Most Transparent Administration Ever™” has been a slogan. It has been a product of an administration that Advertising Age recognized as “marketer of the year” in 2008.
The administration has pioneered how government can use social media to distribute what it wants the public to know. Relying on social media to make public announcements has meant there is “no access to the daily business in the Oval Office, who the president meets with, who he gets advice from,” according to ABC News Whiste House correspondent Ann Compton.
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