Less information about Iraq
What the New York times called the "banal bureaucracy of government information" is the day-to-day responsibility of government information professionals. In the last few years, we've seen more and more cases of the government hiding some of the most useful "banal" information. Here is the most recent example:
- U.S. drops Baghdad electricity reports by Noam N. Levey and Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2007.
As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.
...The change, a State Department spokesman said, reflects a technical decision by reconstruction officials in Baghdad...
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When will they learn? When?
You can't make unpleasant news go away by not reporting it. Nor can you build support for a policy not backed up by facts. Not in the long run as we've seen in Iraq.
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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.
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