Cool presidential move
Jan. 28th, 2009 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarahmichiganThere's been a fair amount of press coverage and LJ entries by friends about some of President Obama's early actions, such as his executive order about shutting down Guantanamo Bay and the memorandum about increased fuel efficiency.
Less-noted but incredibly important: Obama has declared that openness in government should be the default. This is beyond "Freedom of Information Act". It doesn't just say you can fight the government to have closed documents opened, but that most documents should be open to public scrutiny in the first place. This is huge for journalists but also for the general public.
There's some good discussion of the issue in general here, and a call to ask state government to be equally open here. On a related note, I recommend Free the News for any bloggers who do on-line journalism or are interested in the topic (and not just because I'm an occasional guest writer for the site).
Less-noted but incredibly important: Obama has declared that openness in government should be the default. This is beyond "Freedom of Information Act". It doesn't just say you can fight the government to have closed documents opened, but that most documents should be open to public scrutiny in the first place. This is huge for journalists but also for the general public.
There's some good discussion of the issue in general here, and a call to ask state government to be equally open here. On a related note, I recommend Free the News for any bloggers who do on-line journalism or are interested in the topic (and not just because I'm an occasional guest writer for the site).
