At the Obama White House: Transparency Transhmarency

Lloyd Grove:

Trying to force The Washington Post to change real quotes was just the latest White House obfuscation. Team Obama has been at it for years. Lloyd Grove reports.

But that self-administered pat on the back is belied by The Washington Post’s recent account of how the president’s spin doctors allegedly tried to rewrite quotes from reporter Barton Gellman’s interview with the National Security Agency’s chief compliance officer. The interview was conducted for Gellman’s blockbuster story on the NSA’s persistent unauthorized surveillance since 2008 of thousands of Americans’ phone calls and emails, and the super-secret agency’s apparent policy of covering up its improper domestic spying.

At a time when Obama communications specialists seem to have grown accustomed to attempting to make reporters accessories to White House message-control in return for granting access to policymakers, the Post stiffened its spine and drew a line in the sand—a stand on principle that is generally being applauded by other news outlets that operate in Washington. New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, for one, praised her competitor for refusing to go along with the NSA’s request that a self-justifying prepared statement be substituted for a pointed interview about the agency’s mistakes.

“The Post has made the right decision, based on its readers’ vital interest in getting accurate and full information,” Abramson wrote in an email. “Quoting an NSA official by name from on-the-record comments made during an interview with the Post gives readers the information they need to assess the information, far more than a generic statement prepared for him by the White House.”

In a highly unusual lifting of the veil on journalistic sausage-making, the Post informed readers—under the provocative headline “An NSA interview, rewritten”—that “the Obama administration referred all questions for this article to John DeLong, the NSA’s director of compliance, who answered questions freely in a 90-minute interview. DeLong and members of the NSA communications staff said he could be quoted ‘by name and title’ on some of his answers after an unspecified internal review. The Post said it would not permit the editing of quotes. Two days later, White House and NSA spokesmen said that none of DeLong’s comments could be quoted on the record and sent instead a prepared statement in his name. The Post declines to accept the substitute language as quotations from DeLong.”

Indeed, in one of the charmingly byzantine folkways of journalism in the nation’s capital, the Post opted not to quote DeLong by name. But Gellman’s story—which was based largely on top-secret documents provided by fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—included extensive comments from someone identified as “a senior NSA official.”

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