Marcus Brown

marcus-brown

The government has a responsibility to its constituency to not only act in the best interest of that constituency but to also be transparent while doing so. The issue of transparency has become a criticism the Obama administration has had to deal with numerous times over the course of President Obama’s two terms. In response to an open letter written by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest to the New York Times about the president’s efforts to be transparent with the press, 40 news organizations signed a letter of their own outlining just how the Obama administration has failed to maintain the level of transparency sought by journalists and reporters.

In Earnest’s letter, he made a point of detailing all of the various ways the administration has engaged with and fulfilled requests of the news media, including points that had been opposed by previous inhabitants of the White House. Things such as “routinely and proactively releasing the name, date, and time of nearly every White House visitor” and “proactively releas[ing] more than 18,000 data sets on a federal government website” were mentioned as a means of supporting the Obama administration’s claims of transparency.

The letter in response, signed by numerous news organizations from all across the country, had a list and cited issues that were the same that were brought to the attention of the Obama administration by a delegation “representing more than 50 journalism and government accountability organizations” at the end of last year. Points of contention included “officials blocking reporters’ requests to talk to specific staff people” and “federal agencies blackballing reporters who wrote critically of them,” among others. It is interesting to note that reporters from the Washington Post have not been able get an interview with the president for nearly seven years.

The media cannot be viewed simply as a luxury of democratic nations and one that can be indulged when convenient for those in positions of authority. There is a reason freedom of the press is in the First Amendment. Transparency and accountability go hand in hand, and an informed people form a more responsible constituency. An uninformed populace is easier to govern, but ease of governance should not be the priority for the elected leaders of a democratic country.

The demands of those who report and chronicle the actions the leaders of the nation should not be treated as an afterthought and entertained only when public outrage becomes too much of a nuisance. There are extenuating circumstances that require the deliberate withholding of information from the masses, but the daily operations of the federal government should not be one of them. For this reason, Earnest should not pen open letters asking for laud and recognition for doing the bare minimum of what should have been done in the first place.

Something as simple as keeping the public up to date on the actions of those the public elected in the first place is not a privilege or some special service requiring outspoken praise. Furthermore, to have the audacity to ask for credit when the job wasn’t even fully completed is certainly telling and in many ways insulting.

I refuse to congratulate the Obama administration for nothing more than doing its job, and rather poorly, I might add, given the amount of power I have vested and entrusted in it by virtue of my citizenship. Or perhaps I should write an open letter to the New York Times soliciting a standing ovation for paying some of my taxes or lighting only a few buildings on fire, because apparently we are in the business of giving out participation points. So I suppose I should recant and sing the praises of Earnest and the rest of the Obama administration for all their mediocrity and service. Keep doing what you do.