Not That Obama was lying, exactly, or something

[drwex]

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-cites-security-more-censor-deny-records

An in-depth AP story shows how the Obama administration, which started off promising to be "the most transparent in history" has in fact denied more Freedom of Information requests than any other. Ever.

Given the current climate it's sort of unsurprising that their most-cited reason for denying citizen and journalist requests is "national security."

Nothing to see here, move along.

Comments

[macthud]

Those both look like assertions, but I don't see a whole lot of evidence.

[drwex]

You seem to be unwilling to accept either the evidence used by the AP in writing its story or the evidence aelf located. It's unclear to me what you would accept as evidence, or why you have this level of demand for evidence in a news story. It's not my experience that you demand primary evidence for other news stories, which makes me feel like you're unhappy with the message here contradicting what might be your political beliefs and are using extraordinary evidence demands to maintain your belief system.

[macthud]

Facile interpretations of aggregates without backup, nor even substantive description of the methodology by which they were produced, lead to conclusions which I always find questionable. My belief system demands at least the availability of such backup, if not my personal review of same, before I accept any such conclusion.

I am indeed unhappy with the message here, but I am more unhappy with the lack of useful data ("evidence") presented by the AP or any other source mentioned here, whether primary, secondary, or otherwise.

More people died this year than last! Of course, total population was higher, and the increase in deaths is statistically similar to the growth in population, so there's a likely explanation there. Or maybe you'd prefer, "Thanks, Obama!"

Only the aggregates have been presented, and I've asked several questions about those aggregates, which remain without answer. So far as I'm aware, the answers are unavailable, for a number of reasons, not least of which being that the people conducting such studies as have been reported seem not to have gathered the useful underlying data points, if they were available to be gathered at all.

In other words, I'm not really expecting anyone here to present those answers. But I am expecting that others see the weaknesses of the conclusions, exposed by these questions.