Reporters are in an uproar over their limited access to President Barack Obama. Obama's albatross: Transparency

Five years into his presidency, Barack Obama might have been reaping kudos for ushering in a new era of transparency in government.

Instead, he’s under fire for his administration’s secrecy.


The White House has faced a fusillade of high-profile complaints in recent weeks from all corners of Washington.

Reporters are in an uproar over their limited access to the president, most recently when the White House released pictures taken by official photographer Pete Souza of Obama and former President George W. Bush together on Air Force One during the lengthy journey to and from South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral.

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News photographers on the plane, meanwhile, had limited access to the pair.

“What the [Obama] White House communications shop has done is arguably in violation of the president’s commitment to openness and transparency and accountability,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said at a POLITICO Playbook event last week. “They want to control the message.”

Open government groups, meanwhile, are upset with what they say are incomplete Freedom of Information Act responses and administration efforts to limit disclosure. And senators say they’re being stonewalled from releasing a report on CIA interrogation practices.

There likely has been more transparency under this president than any of his predecessors — but not necessarily by choice. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks have led the administration to declassify and release significant troves of information about surveillance practices.

Even planned attempts at public access have gone awry. The White House touts access to the president’s public schedule as one of its transparency accomplishments, but that can bring more grief than credit. Outside groups have used the schedules to publish reports questioning how often the president gets security briefings or met with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in the months leading up to the deeply flawed rollout of HealthCare.gov.

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But the schedule is incomplete. A POLITICO review last year found that of the more than 4,000 official photos of Obama released by the White House, about one-third depicted events that were not on his public schedule.

Obama aides said the reasons for omitting events vary from security concerns to a desire not to offend groups if the president chooses not to show up to decisions to announce the meetings on social media instead. Even benign policy events such as an Oval Office meeting with Obama and 17 members of his staff to discuss international trade talks have been omitted.

Despite complaints from the news media and openness advocates, Obama aides say the White House has fulfilled the president’s pledge.

“Over the past five years, federal agencies have gone to great efforts to make government more transparent and more accessible than ever, to provide people with information that they can use in their daily lives, and to solicit public participation in government decision-making and thus tap the expertise that resides outside of government,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a statement that echoes one he gave to POLITICO in May 2012.

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Schultz also noted the award Obama received from the organizers of Sunshine Week “for this administration’s historic improvements to the FOIA process.”

That award, delivered by some open government groups in 2011, was presented at a closed-press Oval Office meeting.

Obama won credit for his initial actions, but the luster has worn off, said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. They “took their reward up front,” he said. “They took all the praise during the campaign and in the first year of the administration, and then they were expected to deliver and the delivery has been uneven at best.”

The administration’s efforts to rein in access to information are “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” veteran Washington Post editor Len Downie wrote in the Committee to Protect Journalists’ report on challenges to press freedom in October.

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Downie says White House officials sincerely believe they are more transparent, but are interpreting the term differently than many in the press corps.

“They really do believe that they’re transparent,” he said in an interview. “They understand they’re blocking the press, but they think they’re doing a great job being transparent by making so much accessible via social media.”

Obama’s team puts a lot of weight on public engagement initiatives, like the innovative “We The People” petition site and efforts to allow the public to offer advice on proposed regulations. They also point to the first-ever, routine disclosure of White House visitor logs.

The administration routinely releases official White House photos and video on sites like Flickr, Twitter and YouTube, giving the public direct access to the materials. But the press often doesn’t have independent access to those events.

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AP photography director Santiago Lyon took to The New York Times this month to blast the White House for “draconian restrictions on photojournalists’ access to the president” and urged the public to reject officially released photos as “propaganda.”

Lyon’s op-ed and the limited access on the South Africa trip led to a 17-minute-plus feeding frenzy at a White House briefing with press secretary Jay Carney earlier this month.

“Anyone here can tell that there’s less access than under the Bush administration,” CNN’s Brianna Keilar said at one point.

Carney insisted that Obama’s White House isn’t giving less access to press photographers and that many of the journalists’ complaints are driven by competitive pressures relating to the Internet.

“We’re not operating any differently than other White House offices have operated except that the Internet exists,” Carney said. “And the White House posts some pictures on the Internet identified as official White House photographs. So the fundamental difference here is distribution.”

Obama does give more one-on-one interviews than his recent predecessors, but he avoids the impromptu give and take that many previous presidents routinely engaged in on a near-daily basis with beat reporters. This irritates those who daily cover the White House because it means less fodder for stories about the news of the day.

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“Every president has their own style,” Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said on MSNBC recently. “We used to let the press come in and they fire four, five questions at a time. President Obama has a different style and much more sit-down.”

But the White House press strategy can produce delays in getting the president’s message or response to events into the national news.

When George Zimmerman was acquitted in the Trayvon Martin case this summer, Obama issued a written statement but didn’t react to it in person for six days. After Spanish-language TV reporters failed to ask him about the verdict in interviews, Obama came to the briefing room to address it, delivering a speech many regard as one of his most heartfelt and eloquent.

Obama himself has sometimes acknowledged that his administration has lost track of the value of transparency when hurtling toward other goals, like passing the Affordable Care Act.

“We had to make so many decisions quickly in a very difficult set of circumstances that after a while, we started worrying more about getting the policy right than getting the process right,” Obama told ABC News in 2010, promising to “move forward in a way that recaptures that sense of opening things up more.”

Yet similar transparency failures have been evident in the recent health care website debacle with officials discussing enrollment numbers behind the scenes but declining to offer real-time statistics to the press and public.

The massive and unauthorized disclosures by Snowden and Pvt. Chelsea Manning also tend to make the administration’s own declassification efforts look meager and reactive.

“It just continues along this way,” said Downie, now a professor of journalism at Arizona State University. “It not only seems to go against the philosophy the president has articulated, at the same time it appears to be bad politics,” he said, arguing that the Obamacare website would have gotten high-level attention sooner if it weren’t for the strict message control.

Former administration officials say that, much like the unfulfilled promise to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay within a year, it’s possible Obama’s pledge to run the most transparent government ever simply wasn’t well thought out.

“Particularly in upstart campaigns, there’s always a tendency to try to use the transparency issue to your benefit,” said Jake Siewert, a White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton and a top Treasury Department adviser during Obama’s first term. “But when you’re governing in the White House you’re much more wary of the pitfalls of real-time transparency around everything. It makes decision-making hard.”

To some Clinton-era aides, Obama’s transparency promise harkens back to a promise Clinton made to cut the White House staff by 25 percent. It sounded good on the campaign trail, but the pledge plagued his aides for years .

“If a future administration was thinking of making promises on this, I’d say, ‘Don’t tell me what you’re going to do, just do it. Underpromise and overdeliver,’” said Aftergood. “This administration unfortunately has done the opposite. They inflated expectations beyond their ability to fulfill them.”

That complaint extends especially to the availability of government records under FOIA, where requests routinely linger for years without a response and often wind up producing a ream of blacked-out text.

Administration officials say they’ve reduced backlogs governmentwide by 45 percent, but transparency advocates say the numbers are misleading, with much of that reduction coming from agencies sending out letters on long-pending requests and then closing them without releasing any records when requesters give up or don’t respond.

Administration lawyers also persist in spirited fights to preserve Obama’s own power to act in secret. For more than two-and-a-half years, they’ve fought the Center for Effective Government’s FOIA request for a copy of a governmentwide foreign aid directive Obama signed in 2010. The order is unclassified and has been widely distributed to government agencies, but administration lawyers made claim the memo is covered by executive privilege — a privilege meant to encourage robust discussion between the president and his advisers.

A federal judge bluntly rejected the administration stance last week, knuckle-rapping the Obama team for making claims she described as “troubling” and “limitless.”

“The government appears to adopt the cavalier attitude that the President should be permitted to convey orders throughout the Executive Branch without public oversight … to engage in what is in effect governance by ‘secret law,’” U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle wrote in ordering the global development directive released.

The administration’s own report cards on openness omit the unprecedented wave of eight criminal prosecutions relating to leaks of classified information to the media — a tally exceeding that of all prior presidents combined. Critics say the charges intimidate potential whistleblowers.

Administration officials say they’ve enhanced protections for whistleblowers and note that Obama signed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act into law last year.

White House officials are usually silent about the criminal cases. However, Justice Department and intelligence officials say the prosecutions are not inconsistent with an effort to make government more transparent through authorized channels. They also argue that allowing individual government employees to in effect declassify anything they have concerns about would invite chaos and damage national security.

Despite the continuing flurry of prosecutions, the administration has retreated somewhat on the leaks front in recent months, changing course when exposed to intense pressure from Capitol Hill and the press. Over the summer, DOJ acted with Obama’s consent to make major changes in how such probes involve journalists, stepping back from aggressive practices in earlier cases that pried into reporting by Fox News and the AP.

Lawmakers are also unhappy with the administration over access to legal opinions and other records. Senators lashed out last week over long delays in release of a 6,000-page report the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to approve last December on CIA interrogation practices during the George W. Bush administration.

“Holding up things that this committee has asked for, specifically with respect to the detention and interrogation report, is so very sensitive with us,” committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said with evident frustration. “Let’s get on with it.”

There’s no doubt the administration has been aware for months — at its highest levels — of the report and lawmakers’ desire to get it out. Way back in May, a White House photographer captured CIA Director John Brennan, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and Obama standing in a hallway near the Oval Office with Brennan holding a copy of the CIA’s response to the Senate report. (The pic was released on the White House website.)

While Obama has vowed a new drive to close Guantanamo, insight into key events there is also eroding. Periodic review boards screening detainees for possible release recently started up again for the first time in the Obama administration, but with no real-time access to the hearings for the news media or human rights groups — both of which were allowed to sit in on unclassified portions of similar hearings during the Bush era.

Military officials say that, despite two years of planning, they couldn’t arrange direct access to the sessions but will make declassified transcripts available later on.

Also at Guantanamo, the military recently stopped releasing counts of detainees on hunger strike and of those being subjected to force-feeding. Spokesmen say commanders concluded that releasing statistics was perpetuating the protest — even though it dwindled dramatically before the blackout earlier this month.

“A bunker mentality has set in,” said the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, dean of the Guantanamo press corps. “I’m not sure if they lost confidence in their message, or they’ve lost confidence in their security situation. But something has profoundly changed.”

While Obama aides defend their record, they say they’re committed to doing better. The 2nd National Action Plan on Open Government, released earlier this month, makes new promises including a vow to create a single website to file FOIA requests at any federal agency and a new interagency panel to reform the classification system.

Carney also tried to calm relations with the press corps by hosting a meeting last week with representatives of various press groups. Participants said the press secretary insisted that everyone from Obama (who did not attend) on down, there’s a desire to allow more access to the press.

And when an outside review panel delivered its report to Obama on National Security Agency surveillance earlier this month, the White House initially said it planned to keep the volume under wraps for weeks, until the president and his team could fully digest it and make decisions about which recommendations to accept.

This would have delayed some awkward questions for the president and might have limited attention to an issue that has been a real headache for the administration. But it also flew in the face of his claims that he welcomes public debate on the subject, and in a sudden reversal the White House released the report.

Carney attributed the change to “inaccurate and incomplete reports in the press about the report’s content.”

During his yearend press conference on Friday, Obama also spoke of turning over a new leaf — though it was hard to tell how serious he was.

“My New Year’s resolution is to be nicer to the White House press corps,” Obama said.