Not Exactly Open-Source

Slate's John Dickerson has a nice piece today that connects two trends that have shaped coverage of the transition: Obama's committment to bring a lot more, and a lot more sophisticated, technology to government, and questions about how open to the press his legendarily discipled operation will be. Some of the points are pretty simplistic: releasing a YouTube video of his weekly address may get that address out to more people, but it doesn't give more people the opportunity to ask questions or reveal any more than Obama and his team want to. But the overall point is an important one:

Obama will show he is transparent not by delivering his message in some new way but by conveying actual information. He's got to tell the truth, yes, but he's also got to have something to say. His most powerful statements during the campaign were not conveyed through an Ethernet cable but from a stage, alone, with a microphone, the way it has been done for 100 years. If the promise of transparency and candor never arrives but the hype continues, his campaign will have produced the political equivalent of vaporware.