‘America needs you and our democracy needs you.” Exit Barack Obama, delivering a farewell panegyric to the presidential press corps. “You cast a critical eye on the powerful. You’ve done it, for the most part, in ways that I could appreciate for fairness, even if I didn’t always agree with your conclusions. Having you in this building has made this place work better. It keeps us honest, made us work harder.”
Which is all well and good – especially when Chelsea Manning sees a savagely long sentence reduced and the prospect of a life after prison renewed. But don’t glow too roseate about the White House just past as its new commander-in-chief stalks in.
As the Columbia Journalism Review reminds us, this allegedly “most transparent administration in history” over eight years “prosecuted more leakers than all previous presidents combined”. Former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr concluded in the 2013 report of the Committee to Protect Journalists (entitled The Obama Administration and the Press), that this White House’s “war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since Nixon”. Reporters Without Borders rates Obama’s America 41st country out of 180 in its press freedom index.
The irony, though, isn’t that Obama and his pretty blotchy record on open government will be long remembered in press clubs far and wide. It’s that it’s already more or less forgotten and forgiven as Donald Trump arrives.
