While running for office President Barack Obama spoke repeatedly about the need to have a more transparent government, a campaign promise that never came to fruition as a report from the Committee to Protect Journalists shows that the government officials fear speaking with the press and that surveillance and prosecution of reporters and their sources is rampant, according to CBS News.
The group normally focuses its attention on oppression of the press in foreign countries but conducted the study in part because of the unprecedented number of prosecutions of government sources under the Obama administration, according to the Associated Press.
"In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press," Leonard Downie Jr., a journalism professor at Arizona State, wrote in the report. "The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in the Washington Post's investigation of Watergate."
Earlier this year it was revealed that the government had seized telephone records from more than 100 Associated Press journalists in attempt to find who had been the source of certain government leaks.
"There's no question that sources are looking over their shoulders," Michael Oreskes, the senior managing editor of the Associated Press, said. "Sources are more jittery and more standoffish, not just in national security reporting. A lot of skittishness is at the more routine level. The Obama administration has been extremely controlling and extremely resistant to journalistic intervention."
The report documented the clashes that happened between the Bush administration and reporters who had uncovered the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison but makes the assertion that the Obama administration has made more of an effort at stifling reporting about the government, according to CBS News.
"When I'm asked what is the most manipulative and secretive administration I've covered, I always say it's the one in office now," Bob Schieffer from CBS said in the report. "Every administration learns from the previous administration. They become more secretive and put tighter clamps on information. This administration exercises more control than George W. Bush's did, and his before that."
