Not long into the life of the super-ultra-transparent Obama administration, the Washington press corps found itself wondering if the White House knows the difference between transparent and invisible. So much basic official information had come offered only in so-called “background briefings” in which no actual official puts his or her name on the line that the press screamed foul. Led by Associated Press correspondent Jennifer Loven, who’s also president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, reporters demanded that officials stop sounding like a broken off-the-record. Loven’s boss, the AP’s Michael Oreskes, says that background briefings make it impossible for the public to evaluate the information.

MICHAEL ORESKES: Do you know where it came from? Do you know what the motive of the person who gave it to you is? Do you know what their reliability is? And the background briefing undercuts all of that. It makes it harder to tell where the information’s coming from and what the motives of the source are. Jennifer and her colleagues felt there was a time here to draw a line early in the administration and to say, you shouldn't just use this because you felt like it or ‘cause you could.

BOB GARFIELD: I can see how these background briefings began. It seems to me that it goes back to a diplomatic problem where a secretary of state would want to be frank and candid but for international diplomacy reasons simply could not, and therefore the secretary of state became a, you know, highly-placed State Department official.

MICHAEL ORESKES: The most famous example of that, Bob, was the senior official traveling aboard Secretary Kissinger’s plane, who every journalist in Washington knew [BOB LAUGHING] was Secretary Kissinger. But somehow we had agreed not to reveal who it really was.

BOB GARFIELD: Exactly. But as silly as that may seem, in recent weeks the situation has gotten absurd.

MICHAEL ORESKES: The situation has become a parody of itself in a number of cases. We've had briefings, for example, on the administration’s plans for the auto industry. They insisted it be on background. We went ahead and allowed it to be on background. They got up from these briefings on the auto industry and went out on cable TV and said the same thing. We're not asking them to eliminate every background briefing on every possible subject. We're just suggesting that there are many of these background briefings that simply don't need to be on background.

BOB GARFIELD: When is it warranted to accept on background only?

MICHAEL ORESKES: Well, I wouldn't set a hard and fast rule. There certainly are cases, as you described, where perhaps a diplomatically delicate situation justifies it. There may be cases where national security requires it, for some reason or another. It’s clearly not the case when a background briefing is simply giving an administration position that the administration then repeats in other ways, in other forums. That’s clearly not serving anybody.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so I'm a reader of The Daily Bugle and I'm reading a story from the AP about a White House briefing. I see “senior administration official.” I don't see the actual name. What do I care? The information’s there, right?

MICHAEL ORESKES: I think it’s something President Obama himself has said. We live in an age where people need to take more responsibility, and we want the people who give us the information to be responsible for that information. And background briefings undercut responsibility. People say things without being responsible for them, and we think that’s a mistake.

BOB GARFIELD: So it strikes me that there’s a simple solution to this problem, and that is for the White House press corps to get some backbone, and the next time someone in the administration tries this to simply say, no, we will not take this on background, and, oh, by the way, we are going to report the attempt to take official information on background and continue to do that until you start talking to us on the record the way you’re supposed to.

MICHAEL ORESKES: Our Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier has been talking very closely with some of his colleagues, the other bureau chiefs for major news organizations here in Washington, and they, in turn, have been talking to the White House about what the next steps are going to be. We're hoping to negotiate a reasonable set of ground rules for briefings by the White House which puts many more of them on the record, while still respecting those rare occasions when the White House might have a real need to put something on background. The tone of the discussions with the White House has been very good. We've been quite frank and honest with each other. So we're pressing the issue now, and we will press forward with it. So stay tuned, as you would say, in radio.

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] All right, I'll stay tuned, but what I've been tuning into mostly is the comments that I've been reading which get to the point that, well no, we can't walk out on these sessions because we don't want to be the one news organization that doesn't get the information that’s being presented on background, you know, the argument being, what can we do, it’s a seller’s market.

MICHAEL ORESKES: It’s a seller’s market only as long as we're ready to buy. We are working to come up with a unified approach so that no one news organization will feel like they're walking out and being left in the lurch by others who decide to go in and get the information.

BOB GARFIELD: Has any previous press corps ganged up and said this will not stand?

MICHAEL ORESKES: Yeah, we had this very same argument with the Bush administration, and actually for a while made some progress, I thought, and then slipped back again. You try to renegotiate the relationship with each new administration, so I think part of what we're going through here is starting over with a fresh team and a new crew and hoping we can draw the line in a place that’s satisfactory to everybody.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, that’s very grownup of you and I appreciate the spirit of cooperation. But at some point do you stop negotiating and just say no?

MICHAEL ORESKES: We may have to. If we have to, we have to, but we'll cross that Rubicon when we get to it.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Mike, thank you so much.

MICHAEL ORESKES: Good to talk to you, Bob.

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BOB GARFIELD: Mike Oreskes is senior managing editor at The Associated Press.

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