August 2012

[Commentary] Ten years ago when I was White House press secretary, before Twitter and Facebook, in an era when reporters used to pick up their phones to conduct interviews as opposed to e-mailing, I would have been laughed out of the briefing room if I tried to get quote approval for something I said.

Occasionally, I talked on background as a senior administration official, but no reporter would ever let me pick and choose which on-the-record quotes they could use nor would anyone let me edit or clean up a quote. My how things have changed -- and the change began, it's important to note -- toward the end of the second term of George W. Bush. Peter Baker, another reporter at The New York Times who has covered the last three White Houses, told me in an (on-the-record) interview that quote approval evolved from something beneficial to a "pernicious practice to be avoided." Like Prohibition, it began with good intent. Reporters covering Bush's second term, under pressure from editors not to use unnamed sources in their stories, started asking their sources if a background quote, attributed to a senior aide, could instead be turned into an on-the-record quote, with the aide's name in print. I e-mailed last week with several former Bush staffers and many confirmed they engaged in that practice. For a very limited number of the most senior aides, that made sense.

[Ari Fleischer, a CNN contributor, was White House press secretary in the George W. Bush administration from 2001 to 2003]

News that Apple will not include a native YouTube app in iOS 6 in favor of a forthcoming standalone app to be built by Google marks another endpoint for the Apple-Google partnership.

The two sides are pulling apart, each new split has different motivations, and both Apple and Google stand to win and lose in different ways. And the specific repercussions of YouTube no longer being bundled in iOS are no different. Google will have a lot more flexibility with a standalone YouTube app. It will be able to update the app much more frequently — and hopefully bring it up to date with the mobile web YouTube experience, which is markedly better than the native app. Perhaps more importantly, Google can now control how it displays lucrative pre-roll advertising in the app. Apple, on the other hand, no longer has to pay whatever license fee may have existed for including YouTube in iOS. What's more, Apple doesn't have to pay its own developers to build an app for a service operated by a direct competitor. Instead, it can assume Google will want to keep YouTube in front of the huge numbers of iOS 6 users and build its own app. Which is exactly what's happening.

[Commentary] Senate Republicans regularly promote themselves as the true custodians of national security. This claim seemed particularly hollow last week when they helped block a new measure aimed at protecting America’s vulnerable computer networks from attack by, among others, potentially hostile foreign governments.

The legislation would have required companies to share data about cyberattacks with the government, and would have created a framework for minimum security standards to toughen computer protections. But the Chamber of Commerce and other business interests said the rules would be too costly and intrusive, and the Republicans went along. The result was to postpone action until after the August recess, and even then the bill may go nowhere given the pressures of election-year politics. The cost of inaction is already high.

Cass R. Sunstein, who wielded enormous power as the White House overseer of federal regulation, came to Washington to test his theories of human behavior and economic efficiency in the laboratory of the federal government. Now he is departing with a record that left many business interests disappointed and environmental, health and consumer advocates even more unhappy. Sunstein, 57, who projected an air of disheveled academic detachment while becoming one of the Obama administration’s most provocative figures, announced August 3 that he was leaving government to return to Harvard Law School.

Applying a cost-benefit analysis to his reviews of proposed rules, he said his goal was simply to make the nation’s regulatory system “as sensible as possible.” His critics saw it differently. “Cass Sunstein is the most well-connected and smartest guy who’s ever held the job,” said Rena Steinzor, president of the Center for Progressive Reform and a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. “But he’s also done untold damage.” As administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, he reviewed the rules implementing President Obama’s health care act and the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law.

“For the last three and a half years,” said President Obama, “Cass Sunstein has helped drive a series of historic accomplishments on behalf of the American people. From putting in place lifesaving protections for America’s families, to eliminating tens of millions of hours of paperwork burdens for our nation’s citizens and businesses, Cass has shown that it is possible to support economic growth without sacrificing health, safety, and the environment. Cass has shepherded our review of existing rules to get rid of those that cost too much or no longer make sense, an effort that is already on track to save billions of dollars. With these reforms and his tenacious promotion of cost-benefit analysis, his efforts will benefit Americans for years to come. I can’t thank him enough for his friendship and for his years of exceptional service.”