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<tr><td><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#333333" size="2"><a href="http://www.cjr.org/feature/transparency_watch_a_closed_door.php" target="_blank"><b>Transparency Watch: A Closed Door</b></a><br>
</font></font></td></tr><tr><td><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#333333" size="2">CURTIS BRAINARD - Columbia Journalism Review</font></font></td></tr><tr><td><br></td></tr><tr><td><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#333333" size="2"><i>The cancer of secrecy creeps across the consciousness of our
culture, invading every nook and cranny. Years ago Herman Kahn, founder
of the Hudson Institute, told me over dinner one night that the
American obsession with secrecy, which in science really took hold with
the Manhattan Project, would eventually cripple the country. Putting a
secret stamp on something just tells your enemies which file cabinets to
look in. In contrast, he said, look at !
lasers -- then one of the most cutting edge areas of applied science --
"It was all done in the open literature. The developments came so
quickly, and were so numerous, they had to publish the submission date.
There might already be more advanced and newer information. The Soviets
could not keep up, and it was hard for them to know what was truly
substantive."</i></font></font></td></tr><tr><td><br></td></tr>
<tr><td><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font color="#333333" size="2">In July 2009, just months after President Obama
took office promising to revolutionize government transparency, leaders
of the Society of Environmental Journalists participated in an
hour-long conference call with public-affairs staffers working for Lisa
Jackson, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Jackson’s
office wanted to hear what the reporters’ gripes were when it came to
access, and Christy George, then the society’s president, and her
colleagues obliged, outlining their most persistent problems: the
requirement to seek permission for interviews with agency scientists and
experts, and difficulty arranging those interviews; the requirement to
have press officers, or 'minders,” on the phone during interviews; and
the glacial pace of processing Freedom of Information Act requests.
Jackson’s assistants asked for the benefit of the doubt. 'We’re no!
t the Bush administration,” George recalled them saying. 'Those days
are left behind.”<br>
<br>
For a while it seemed that might be true. The agency finally released a
ruling, suppressed by the administration of George W. Bush, which states
that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public welfare by contributing
to climate change, and therefore can be regulated under the Clean Air
Act. And it took smaller but appreciated measures, like opening more
lines on press calls to accommodate reporters from smaller outlets and
conducting those calls later in the day to accommodate reporters on the
West Coast.<br>
<br>
Unfortunately, the honeymoon was short-lived. One of the first signs of
distress came during a January 2010 press call to discuss the EPA’s new
budget. The agency surprised reporters by declaring that everyone on the
line except Jackson was speaking on background. When members of the
Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) later complained, two press
officers conceded that the on-background rule was foolish, as George
reported in an issue of group’s quarterly newsletter. Yet the agency
pulled the same stunt three months later. Then things got even worse.<br>
<br>
Responding to President Obama’s Open Government Directive, which ordered
executive departments and agencies to 'take specific actions to
implement the principles of transparency, participation, and
collaboration,” the EPA launched two websites to solicit public comments
about how to fulfill that obligation. In March 2010, SEJ weighed in
with a list of nine recommendations. Days later, during the group’s next
conference call with the agency, Adora Andy, the EPA press secretary at
the time, 'scolded us for daring to comment publicly on their
transparency policies,” says Ken Ward Jr., chairman of the group’s
Freedom of Information Task Force, who participated in the call.
Moreover, Andy threatened to break off the discussions between the EPA
and the society (she never did, and the talks are ongoing). 'I was
shocked,” says Ward, a reporter at The Charleston Gazette in West
Virginia. 'Here we were talking about concerns that journalists have
about the !
lack of transparency. Then we dutifully submit public comments about
the way we thought they should interact with the press, and EPA hammers
us for it. To me, it showed that EPA just doesn’t get transparency.”<br>
<br>
Ward isn’t the only one feeling let down. After Obama issued a number of
directives designed to improve general transparency and access on his
first day in office, he homed in on science, the environment, and public
health as areas needing particular improvement. The focus was a
no-brainer. The Bush administration had earned a reputation for quashing
the free flow of scientific information. In what became the most
infamous example of its meddling, top NASA climate scientist James
Hansen told The New York Times in 2006 that the administration had tried
to stop him from speaking out about the threat of global warming by
ordering the space agency’s public affairs staff to review his upcoming
lectures, papers, and online postings. Today, a slew of reporters
complain that such gag orders are still a problem and that transparency
and access to information is often just as bad, if not worse in some
cases, than it was under the Bush administration.<br>
<br>
A survey of science, health, and environmental journalists, conducted by
CJR and ProPublica, suggests that while his record so far is more mixed
than the anecdotal evidence from journalists indicates, President Obama
has clearly not lived up to his promise on transparency and access. As
has been the case on many fronts with Obama, the expectations among
journalists that things were going to improve were so high, a failure to
live up those expectations was almost inevitable.<br>
<br>
We surveyed a random sample of members of SEJ, the Association of Health
Care Journalists, the National Association of Science Writers, and
Investigative Reporters and Editors on several issues, including the
processing of Freedom of Information Act requests, access to experts,
and overall transparency. Responses were anonymous and nearly four
hundred journalists responded out of the roughly 2,100 selected to
participate. (Survey results reflect the opinions of those who
responded, and may not reflect the opinions of the entire sample.) Those
who responded were seasoned, with nineteen years in journalism on
average, including an average of fourteen years covering science,
environment, or health beats. Most respondents were either full-time
staffers or freelancers for print or online publications.<br>
<br>
To some extent, the survey contradicts the impressions of journalists
who complain that the situation is worse under Obama than it was under
Bush. Neither administration was rated 'strong” or 'very strong” in any
category by a majority of respondents. But overall, Obama received
higher marks in nearly every category. Thirty percent gave Obama a
'poor” or 'very poor” grade on overall transparency and access to
information, compared to 44 percent for the Bush administration. Most-42
percent-gave Obama a 'fair” grade overall.<br>
<br>
Likewise, Obama got better marks than Bush in four specific categories
of transparency and access: interview permissions, interview minders,
online databases, and processing foia requests. Unsurprisingly, given
his directive to make more government information available online,
Obama showed the greatest amount of improvement over Bush in the
databases category, with 31 percent giving the administration a 'strong”
or 'very strong” grade. Progress in the other categories was small to
insignificant, however, and in each one most respondents gave both Obama
and Bush of 'poor” or 'very poor.” Respondents with more experience
tended to have harsher opinions, giving the Obama administration
generally lower marks.<br>
<br>
Marginal progress, however, does not an open government make, and the
fact that a third of survey participants said Obama is basically doing a
poor job overall does not bode well for the free flow of information.
His administration is clearly trying, just not quite as hard as he
suggested it would.<br>
<br>
Felice Freyer, for instance, who chairs the Association of Health Care
Journalists’ Right to Know Committee, says the committee’s effort to
fight secrecy has followed a course nearly identical to the one
described by leaders of SEJ. In April 2010, the association began a
series of meetings and phone calls with the Department of Health and
Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about
improving access to federal experts. But progress has been difficult to
elusive.<br>
<br>
Responding to Obama’s calls for openness, the FDA created a Transparency
Task Force a few months after his inauguration. The health-care
association joined ten other journalism organizations and more than two
dozen individual journalists to send a letter to the task force
demanding that it end the requirements that journalists obtain
permission to conduct an interview, and that public information officers
listen to interviews. Six months later, representatives of the
association met with Jenny Backus, who became the top press secretary at
HHS, to voice some of the same concerns. Backus defended the
department’s policies requiring interview permissions and minders, but
expressed a desire to work with the press. 'She gave us her line about,
‘We really want to help reporters, and we believe in transparency,’ ”
Freyer says. 'She even told me that HHS believed the regional media were
important, and that it wasn’t just talking to The Washington Post and
The N!
ew York Times. But she also promised us a list of all the media
contacts in HHS, and then never delivered. She talked about having us
come to meet with the department’s pubic information officer at this
convention in September. She said she’d look into it, and then never
did. So she never really followed up on most of what she promised.”<br>
<br>
Such neglect has real-world consequences. Around the same time, Freyer
was working on a story for The Providence Journal, where she’s been the
medical reporter since 1989. Ten percent of the
obstetrician-gynecologists in Rhode Island had admitted to inserting a
type of intrauterine device (iud), a form of birth control, into
hundreds of women, which had not been approved by the FDA for use in the
United States and which they’d obtained illegally at discount prices
from foreign sources. The FDA launched an investigation, about which
Freyer had questions. Unsure which press officer to approach, she filled
out the 'Timely Response E-mail Form” on the agency’s website. Several
hours passed with no response, so she called and spoke with a press
officer. He suggested that Freyer e-mail her questions to him, which she
did. Nothing. When she called again two days later, the press officer
said he was waiting for a response from his superiors. He suggested that
she resubmi!
t her questions for a third time. She did, to no effect. Several more
days passed and she sent yet another e-mail asking if she could expect
answers, and if not, why. 'At this point, all we can say is that the FDA
is continuing to look into these cases,” the press officer replied.<br>
<br>
Freyer recounted the saga in an online article for the AHCJ:<br>
<br>
I published my story, stating that the FDA had declined to answer
any questions. Four days later, the FDA posted a ‘consumer update’ on
its website referring to the Rhode Island controversy and warning
consumers against iuds. . . . It turned out the fda’s position was not
the ‘No comment’ I received. The agency had quite a lot to say on the
matter, but had declined to say it in the newspaper serving the hundreds
of women throughout Rhode Island who were distressed and frightened by
the IUD incident. They deserved better from the agency that was supposed
to be protecting them.<br>
<br>
Freyer e-mailed the press officer with whom she’d corresponded as well
as the fda’s chief press officer to ask what had happened. When neither
replied, she e-mailed Backus at HHS, who finally got the FDA to
apologize for its unresponsiveness and promise to do better. Backus was
replaced shortly thereafter, however. As Freyer put it, the association
had to 'start all over again,” and transparency problems have continued
under Backus’s successor, Richard Sorian.<br>
<br>
At the beginning of 2011, for instance, the FDA stunned reporters while
announcing changes to its medical-device approval process. The
announcement was under embargo and the agency’s press officers barred
journalists seeking outside comment from sharing information about the
changes with experts until the embargo lifted. The association wrote a
letter of protest, pointing out that the prohibition 'rewrote a
long-standing compact between reporters and various public and
scientific organizations,” which typically allows reporters to share
embargoed material with sources while working on their stories. Members
of the Right to Know Committee pressed the matter, and in June the FDA
reversed course. Around the same time, HHS also finally released the
list of senior media officials in each of its divisions, which the
association had been requesting for about a year.<br>
<br>
Despite these victories, and the launch of what will be ongoing
quarterly conversations with hhs’s public affairs staff, Freyer is
unsure how much progress has been made. 'The big issue is that reporters
who’ve been at this for a while remember being able to call up and talk
to the people who actually knew what was going on, not just
spokespeople, and that’s become increasingly difficult,” she says. 'So I
don’t see milestones here. It’s been an ongoing problem that we’re
chipping away at.”<br>
<br>
The Obama administration’s transparency problem not only affects access
to federal scientists and highly politicized environmental and medical
science. It’s also about access to government documents and databases,
and basic research. In 2006, allegations emerged that an electron
microscopy research group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee,
which receives millions of dollars a year from the Department of
Energy, had fabricated data. Suspecting lax oversight, freelance
reporter Eugenie Samuel Reich, now a contributing correspondent for the
journal Nature, filed a FOIA request for files related to the ensuing
investigation, which had been initiated and organized by the lab itself.
The Department of Energy rejected the request, so Reich bided her time
until the 2008 presidential election ushered in a new administration.
When Obama made his pledge about openness and then appointed Steven Chu
and a number of other 'scientists with excellent reputations” to the!
department, she believed there would be a 'change of heart.” There
wasn’t. Reich filed a lawsuit under the FOIA in 2009, which a federal
district judge in Boston finally dismissed in April of this year, to her
amazement.<br>
<br>
'This record had nothing to do with national security-not even the
government claims it does-so it is a very good test case of how other,
non-security-related records are being handled,” Reich says. 'The
government’s court filings have been relentless and extraordinary, with
numerous deliberate references to the need for privacy, confidentiality,
and respecting the proprietary rights of government contractors.”<br>
<br>
Some of President Obama’s most vociferous critics on the transparency
front will grudgingly concede, as our survey seemed to suggest, that his
administration has made marginal progress. 'A lot of colleagues would
stone me for saying this, but it actually has gotten better,” says Joe
Davis, the director of the SEJ’s Freedom of Information Project. 'And I
think one of the most illustrative cases in point is the one about coal
ash.” In December 2008, a coal-ash containment pond at a power plant in
Tennessee burst, spreading toxic waste across hundreds of acres and
dozens of homes. The spill was the last skirmish in the society’s long
battle over transparency and access with the Bush EPA, which took eleven
days to release the results of its first tests of the sludge. An agency
official under the new Obama administration promised to do better, but
in June 2009, SEJ accused the EPA of 'hiding” a list of high-hazard,
coal-ash impoundments across the country,!
some of which posed potential threats to residential communities. At
first, the agency echoed the post-September 11 Bush line about guarding
the information for national security reasons. 'Terrorists were less of a
threat than a good rainstorm, which might sweep away any of those
impoundments,” Davis says. 'But eventually they released the list, so we
have that information and the communities [near the impoundments] know
about them, and maybe safety measures will be put in place. That
information would not have come out under the Bush administration.
That’s the difference. However, I will also say in my next breath that
the Obama administration hasn’t lived up to its promises. They raised
our expectations so high and the distance we’ve come is disappointingly
short.”<br>
<br>
One thing that helped raise those expectations was the memo that
President Obama sent to John Holdren, then awaiting confirmation as
director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP), in March 2009. It directed him to draft a plan to improve
scientific integrity throughout the executive branch. A key provision
was the development of a public communications plan. Obama gave Holdren
120 days to complete the assignment. Now, more than two years later, the
plan is still not in place. In August 2010, more than a year after they
were due, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility-a
nonprofit alliance of local, state, and federal natural resource
professionals-submitted a FOIA request to Holdren’s office for a copy of
the recommendations and related policy documents. After two months
passed with nothing from OSTP, the group sued.<br>
<br>
Finally, last December, Holdren released a memo providing guidance to
departments and agencies about how to improve scientific integrity and
openness. The document immediately drew criticism from transparency
watchdogs for 'legitimizing,” as the SEJ put it, interview permissions
and minders. A few days later, OSTP released the related policy
documents-meeting notes, progress reports, congressional testimony-that
the public employees group had requested. They were heavily redacted,
but in the snippets that weren’t SEJ’s Joe Davis saw the fingerprints of
a suspect he believes has played a key role in thwarting progress
toward openness and access over multiple administrations: the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB), which has the power to review and approve
programs, policies, and procedures throughout the executive branch.<br>
<br>
The documents that OSTP released revealed that, in fact, Holdren and
company had sent their transparency recommendations to OMB by June 2009,
on schedule to meet Obama’s original deadline, and that the effort
foundered there. More than a year later, the two offices were still
trying to settle on a final draft of the recommendations, which weren’t
released until December 2010, more than seventeen months behind
schedule. Last May, Holdren once again extended the deadline for
departments and agencies to submit draft policies, which were due around
the time this article went to press.<br>
<br>
'omb, an agency with very little in-house scientific expertise, has been
monkeying with science for a very long time, and asserting authority
over the science process in the federal government,” Davis says. 'It
provides an ideal mechanism for interference.”<br>
<br>
There are other mechanisms. Even in departments and agencies with
special expertise in the sciences, there is often an entrenched corps of
civil servants that resists transparency and access-often as a result
of turf battles and a sense that bosses, and their edicts, come and
go-and survives from one administration in the other. New appointments
often do nothing to help matters. Numerous reporters pointed out that
the top press officers at departments and agencies often are recruited
from a president’s campaign staff, with disastrous results. 'They want
to run government agencies like they’re political campaigns and they
don’t seem to understand that there ought to be a difference,” says
SEJ’s Ken Ward Jr. 'All the information that EPA has about its
inspections, its enforcement, its science-that belongs to the public.”<br>
<br>
Changing the culture of secrecy is a lot harder than redecorating the
Oval Office. Some watchdogs believe that transparency and access have
steadily diminished since the 1970s, as successive administrations
clamped down more tightly, and with a greater sophistication, on the
free flow of information to the public. Indeed, many veteran reporters I
spoke to think that the very establishment of press policies and
guidelines, not unlike those that Obama called for, are what led to
problems in the first place. These edicts were supposed to open and
streamline communication between government and the press, but by
codifying practices such as the dreaded interview permissions and
minders, they actually gave government a mechanism to block journalists
when it was politically pragmatic to do so. In early August, for
example, the EPA finally released its scientific integrity proposal, as
per John Holdren’s instruction. But it did exactly what transparency
watchdogs feared: it encour!
aged scientists to interact with the press, but required that they
inform their superiors about those interactions and instructed public
affairs staff to 'attend interviews,” thereby formalizing the
permissions and minders policy that journalists complain about.<br>
<br>
Contrary to the notion that Obama would, as he promised, usher in a sea
change in terms of transparency, there is a case to be made that, when
it comes to controlling information via press policies, Obama is the
savviest practitioner ever. Consider his adroit use of digital media as a
defining example. His Open Government Directive made an unprecedented
amount of federal scientific data available online. His administration
touts that accomplishment as proof of transparency, but critics say that
is disingenuous. In practice, the databases demonstrate how the Obama
administration treats communication as a one-way street. Data, after
all, rarely speak for themselves and reporters want, more than anything,
to talk to the officials who collected and analyzed them. As Felice
Freyer found out when she attempted to speak with the FDA about its
investigation of unapproved intrauterine devices, however, the
administration often prefers to publish statements online, or via social
media!
, than make them directly available to journalists. It’s a duplicitous
game that allows Obama to claim that his administration is living up to
its promises. Yet almost any science reporter in the country will tell
you that nothing could be further from the truth, and that even if the
Office of Science and Technology Policy produces a plan for scientific
integrity and transparency, it could make matters worse, not better.<br>
<br>
Reporters on the science beat may have to accept that the days of easy
access are gone-and plenty of them already do. Groups like the Society
of Environmental Journalists and the Association of Health Care
Journalists are still pushing for an end to interview permissions and
minders, as well they should. But even their most optimistic members
merely cross their fingers, knowing that if they held their breath,
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