The word of the week is “transparency.”  No, this isn’t the vapid hopey-changey wordage that the Obama campaign and administration has been using for the past two years, rather the transparency I’m speaking of here involves the literal process of revealing truths, exposing potentially negative material and providing a fair playground on which lovers of rational thought can explore and determine reality for themselves.  At the end of the day, transparency is all about providing access to information and ideas, while shifting power to the people to subsequently formulate conclusions.  This week, two transparency medals of honor should be given out – one to the Sunlight Foundation and the other to Andrew Breitbart (naturally).

First and foremost, in a bid to once again outdo itself in the categories of “way too cool” and “ultra useful,” The Sunlight Foundation has created a timely democracy tool that offers the American public a first-hand look into the opinions and past work of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  The new project, called “Elena’s Inbox” takes Kagan’s public e-mails from her Clinton administration years and organizes them in an easy-to-view format, thus providing unprecedented access and perspective.  In an e-blast from Sunlight yesterday afternoon, Jake Brewer wrote,

All of the emails sent and received by Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan during her time in the Clinton White House were recently put online… [We] built a site to take Elena Kagan’s emails and make them readable…While we’re in the middle of Kagan’s hearing for the Supreme Court, it’s fascinating to get a sense of her through her public emails.

In the past, I’ve voiced concern over Kagan’s take on the first amendment, so I personally plan to sift through her e-mails to gain a better sense of her worldview and how she’ll function on the Supreme Court. This website couldn’t have come at a better time, as the American public (and Congress) learns about the woman who might very well partially shape American law for decades to come. (more…)

The Washington Post’s David Weigel has resigned in the wake of a series of leaked emails, in which the blogger disparaged various figures in the conservative movement he was “covering” in his official capacity as the Post’s point man on the right. His resignation came less than a day after he posted this apology on the Post’s website:

I’m a member of an off-the-record list-serv called “Journolist,” founded by my colleague Ezra Klein. Last Monday, I was deluged with angry e-mail after posting a story about Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) that was linked by the Drudge Report with a headline intimating that I defended his roughing-up of a young man with a camera; after this, the Washington Examiner posted a gossip item about my dancing at a friend’s wedding. Unwisely, I lashed out to Journolist, which I’ve come to view as a place to talk bluntly to friends.

Below the fold are quotes from me e-mailing the list that day — quotes that I’m told a gossip Web site will post today. I apologize for much of what I wrote, and apologize to readers.

There follows some choice Weigelisms:

• “This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.”
• “Follow-up to one hell of a day: Apparently, the Washington Examiner thought it would be fun to write up an item about my dancing at the wedding of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. Said item included the name and job of my girlfriend, who was not even there — nor in DC at all.”
• “I’d politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it.” (more…)

We used to think of the British and European press as far more politicized than ours; after all, their newspapers freely chose up sides and when you picked up a Tory paper such as The Telegraph, a center-right paper like The Times, a center-left paper like The Independent, and a leftist paper like the Guardian, you pretty much knew what you were getting.

American newspapers, on the other hand, were “neutral” and “objective,” like The New York Times and the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francsico Chronicle.

Right.

So how to explain this minor paddling of the “objective” American media by the equally “objective” Columbia Journalism Review: (more…)