Rusted Sky

If you rewrite history - you can make yourself look a lot better. If you don't let history be written at all... you REALLY come out ahead.

The Weekly Standard

New, Transparent WhiteHouse.gov Forgoes Press Briefing Transcripts?

Barack Obama's administration may be promising the "greatest ethical standard ever administered to an executive branch," and increased transparency over his predecessor, but it seems to be forgoing at least one transparency practice that was routine in the Bush White House— transcripts of the daily press briefing.

It's been four days since Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' first (and widely panned) appearance before the White House press corps, but no transcript, summary, or video of the event has shown up on WhiteHouse.gov. The delay could be forgiven in a less tech-savvy bunch, but given the Obama team's considerable online skill, the omission of the the transcript is clearly intentional.

In contrast, the Bush White House provided a transcript of every daily briefing, searchable and accessible in its own section on their web site. The archive, available via the Wayback Machine but not on the new WhiteHouse.gov, started Jan. 24, 2001. The Clinton White House also provided transcripts of the briefing, according to archives, at least as early as 1999.

The decision to withhold transcripts is not a departure from the Obama Team's online posture during the campaign, and signals that's exactly the posture they intend to take for the next four years. Team Obama got a lot of credit for being an active online presence, which indeed it was, but that presence was built for message control, not openness. (My.BarackObama, the campaign's social networking platform, is a different story, but it was cordoned off from the official campaign material, which was pretty tightly controlled.)

I'm hoping this will get enough coverage that it effectively breaks the wall of silence before it gets a chance to set solid.

Hiding the White House transcripts doesn't do much to improve confidence in the administration. Let's hope there isn't more to come in this vein...

J.