President Obama delivered a lecture at a Syracuse University event Monday night, in which he instructed the class of assembled press to do their job. It’s not just the Senate Judiciary Committee that has been on the receiving end of that particular harangue, it seems.
His remarks at an award ceremony for political reporting criticized the journalism industry for failing to hold politicians accountable, as if he’s been of much help. The electorate “would be better served if billions of dollars in free media came with serious accountability,” Obama said in a scantily clad reference to Donald Trump, “especially when politicians issue unworkable plans or make promises they can’t keep.”
This from the person whose signature achievement was a poorly written law twice-challenged in the Supreme Court he sold to young Americans via Zach Galifianakis. If you like it, you can keep it does seem like it was eons ago, given the ready-aim-tweet media culture the president derides.
“10, 20, 50 years from now, no one seeking to understand our age is going to be searching the tweets that got the most retweets, or the post that got the most likes,” Obama said. “They’ll look for the kind of reporting, the smartest investigative journalism that told our story and lifted up the contradictions in our societies, and asked the hard questions and forced people to see the truth even when it was uncomfortable.”
There is no doubt he is correct. What is questionable are his qualifications to deliver such a message. There are occasions in evaluating government — too many of which we ignore — when the words left and right should have no bearing on our observations. One of these concerns the treatment of the press by the officials it covers. This is an issue of constitutional law at the most fundamental level, and one of responsibility and transparency to the populace daily. It doesn’t take a person of a particular politics to deny a public records request.
According to the Associated Press, the current White House set a record for it last year.
“In more than one in six cases, or 129,825 times, government searchers said they came up empty-handed last year. Such cases contributed to an alarming measurement: People who asked for records under the law received censored files or nothing in 77 percent of requests, also a record,” it reported this month.
This covers requests from journalists and other private citizens through the Freedom of Information Act. It doesn’t regard the president’s own government, of which 47 inspectors general formally complained to the congressional oversight committees that some of their colleagues were being stymied by federal agencies. Such restrictions “represent potentially serious challenges to … our ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner,” they wrote.
The administration’s secrecy has earned critical and unprecedented reviews from many working in and with the media, including the New York Times’s James Risen (“the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation”) and former executive editor Jill Abramson (“the most secretive White House I have ever been involved in covering”), Pentagon Papers lawyer James C. Goodale (“… Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom”), and the non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists, which published a harsh report of the Obama White House in 2013.
All of this stems from numerous incidents, some more sensitive and circumstantial than others, particularly on matters of national security. But it all tells the same story.
“Even as the appetite for information and data flowing through the Internet is voracious, we’ve seen newsrooms closed. The bottom line has shrunk. The news cycle has, as well,” the president said Monday. “And too often, there is enormous pressure on journalists to fill the void and feed the beast with instant commentary and Twitter rumors, and celebrity gossip, and softer stories.”
Perhaps if his administration were more open, members of the press would have other things to write about.
