In the battle for open government and transparency, there are winners and losers.
On the upside, you have an informed public, greater access to information and a different kind of civic engagement and interaction. Yet there’s also the potential for negative consequences resulting from complete transparency at the governmental level: Things like threats to national security, the possibility of sensitive intelligence information somehow getting out and a loss of personal privacy top the list.
Still worth the price?
At the 2009 meeting of the Adobe Government Assembly, public affairs officials, government leaders, business executives and journalists considered the merits of a completely transparent government and what it means for society.
Here’s the thing about openness: Complete transparency lies in the inherent inability to control exactly what emerges. If you ask citizens to participate in a conversation, you better be prepared for responses from all levels of the spectrum.
“How do you balance the cost of letting the light shine?,” asked Dee Dee Myers, who served as President Bill Clinton’s press secretary while he was in the White House.
Myers reflected on the two presidents who have come after her boss. The Bush administration favored control of information, Myers said, while the Obama administration completely engaged the electorate, and as a result, ceded a certain level of control. The difficulty lies in translating openness at such a large scale and applying it to the White House, she said.
That’s where the media comes in. Traditionally, we served as interpreters between large amounts of information and statistics collected from the government, agencies, and organizations, and the consumers on the receiving end of the information. Today, that role has been almost eliminated in many cases because there are more open channels of communication and the speed of transmitting information has become so fast. Welcome to the new distributed media economy.
The new open means of communication are even changing the face of war. In the past, a soldier fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan might send a letter home to a family member and the information spread would stop there. But that’s no longer the case.
During the panel, Price Floyd, who works in public affairs for the Department of Defense, gave the following example: A soldier called home from the battlefield and when the call was answered here at home, the receiver heard frantic calls for more ammunition on the other line. Nationwide, a single phone call was propelled to the forefront of national news and somehow taken to mean that our soldiers do not have enough access to ammunition overseas. Where is the analysis in this instance?
Floyd belongs to the select group of individuals who will always rely on expertise, analysis and interpretation of the news before it reaches him. I’m in that group, too.
Here’s a good example: When Floyd Tweeted to his followers on the micro-blogging site Twitter inquiring about their response to the Marine Corps preventing soldiers from using social media, he was shocked at the responses he got.
He said that 30 to 40 percent of the responses were in favor of preventing Marines from using social media while engaged in battle. “Do we really want our soldiers texting and sending Tweets while they defend our nation?,” echoed the Twitterverse in response to his question.
As a member of the press, I feel mandated to say I support openness and complete transparency. But as a consumer of the news and member of our civic society, I agree with ABC correspondent Cokie Roberts’ analysis during the question and answer session after her keynote speech. When asked if she thought open government and transparency would reduce or eliminate boundaries between people belonging to different cultures and backgrounds, she responded by saying that it would in fact worsen it.
Why?
“There is so much anger expressed on the Internet in these blogs and when people go on to a site, and see what’s happening, there seems to be this immediate reaction that they just get mad,” Roberts said. “So I think that this is likely to exacerbate that, rather than people sitting around in a measured way reading the newspaper and saying ‘Hm.’”
I agree.
Kiran Sood will graduate from the Medill School of Journalism in December. She began her career in journalism reporting for her college newspaper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and then for suburban Chicago newspapers. She is passionate about technology and its effects on Generation Y. She wrote this opinion piece for Washington Reporting 2.0., an occasional column about the experience of reporting.