Roger Yu

USA TODAY

Authored by former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie for Committee to Protect Journalists

Six government employees have been subject to prosecution for leaking information

Obama spokesman denies characterizations and says president has given more interviews than other recent presidents

Despite President Obama's promises of transparency, the White House blocks routine information for reporters, seeks aggressive prosecution of classified information leakers and uses its own media channels to shape its messaging, according to a scathing new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Authored by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr., the report portrays an administration gripped by strict policies about information flow and paranoid about leaks across all executive branch departments.

"This is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered," David E. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times, told Downie, who now teaches journalism at Arizona State University.

The administration has implemented an "Insider Threat Program" in all government departments to urge federal employees to monitor their colleagues for possible unauthorized information disclosures. Administration employees suspected of leaking classified information are given lie-detector tests and subject to reviews of their telephone and e-mail records, wrote Downie, who was assisted in reporting by Sara Rafsky.

The report is the latest in a series of portrayals by journalists and media critics of a president whose rigid public relations practices belie his earlier promises of change and open access to public information.

Such accusations had been mounting prior to the series of stories about widespread surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail in the U.S. by the National Security Agency, made possible by internal documents that were leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

Since 2009, six government employees have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions in the leak of classified information to the press, vs. a total of three in all previous U.S. administrations, the report noted.

The White House disputed the report's characterizations and pointed out to Downie that the number of interviews Obama granted in his first four-plus years — including the ones made available to digital media and TV entertainment outlets, such as The Tonight Show — exceeds the combined total of former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

The administration has also put more government data online and worked to speed up processing of Freedom of Information Act requests. "The idea that people are shutting up and not leaking to reporters is belied by the facts," Jay Carney, Obama's press secretary, told Downie.

Still, the crackdown on leakers has made administration officials generally reluctant to talk to reporters even about unclassified information, the report said. Responding to their sources' fear of leaving digital trails of calls and e-mail, reporters also are worried about reaching out to sources, Downie wrote.

"There's a gray zone between classified and unclassified information, and most sources were in that gray zone," New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane told Downie. "Sources are now afraid to enter that gray zone. It's having a deterrent effect."

That even official spokespeople within government agencies are "unresponsive or hostile" to press calls exacerbates the relationship between the president and journalists, he said.

Digitally-savvy aides working for the Obama administration use its own sophisticated websites, social media and internally produced videos to channel information directly to users, much of it useful for consumers. But the amount of information available to the public through these managed channels — with content editorially bent to reflect the administration in a positive note — isn't sufficient, Downie concluded.