Obama keeps reporters away from Dalai Lama event

WASHINGTON (AP) — For all of its talk about transparency, the White House shut out the press Thursday when President Barack Obama met with the Dalai Lama.

Instead, Obama met privately with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader in the Map Room on the ground floor of the White House, far removed from reporters and photographers. Press secretary Robert Gibbs issued only a brief statement after the event, and the White House distributed a single in-house photo of the two leaders.

Typically, when a high-profile foreign dignitary is to meet with the president, photographers and reporters have an opportunity to take pictures and toss a few questions at the president and his guest at the beginning of their Oval Office meeting.

The Dalai Lama, however, is anything but a typical visiting dignitary. The Buddhist monk is viewed as a separatist by the Chinese government and his trips to Washington are always a sensitive matter. His visit forced the administration to balance its desire to avoid inflaming tensions with China with its promises of a new era of transparency in government.

Presidents past also have kept their encounters with the Dalai Lama mostly private. But Kelly McBride, leader of the Poynter Institute's ethics group, said it's hard for the Obama administration to square its pledges of openness with the effort to control coverage of the Dalai Lama.

"That's not very transparent," she said, adding that the administration appeared to be trying to control coverage without completely stifling it. "Trying to control what people make of the images is a difficult task, and probably one of the easiest ways to do that is to limit the number of images."

Asked why the White House had restricted press access, White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest released the following statement: "Rather than restrict the president's meeting with the Dalai Lama to a limited group of photographers, the White House has made available a photo of the meeting at flickr.com/whitehouse to allow any individual or news outlet around the world to view and download that photo free of charge."

Ed Chen, president of the White House Correspondents Association, said a number of still photographers complained about being shut out of the event and said their news organizations would not distribute the handout photo.

The Associated Press declined to distribute the photo. Its policy bars distribution of handout photos when the news organization feels that media access to an event would have been possible, either as a group or through a pooled photo arrangement.

"Government-controlled coverage is not acceptable in societies that promote freedom," said Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP. "And that is why we do not distribute government handouts of events that we believe should be open to the press and therefore the public at large."

After the meeting, the Tibetan leader did have his picture taken by news photographers on the White House driveway when he stopped to talk with reporters.

Obama's campaign pledges for more openness in government have produced mixed results.

He has rolled back Bush administration restrictions on presidential records, posted reams of data about spending under the giant stimulus package, and released logs of visitors to the White House. But his record on issues surrounding the Freedom of Information Act is uneven so far. And though he once advocated televising health care negotiations on C-SPAN, those talks played out in private in recent months.

There will be televised talks next week, though, when the president meets with Democratic and Republican legislative leaders to search for a health care compromise.

Presidents have wrestled with how to handle visits by the Dalai Lama for two decades.

George H.W. Bush allowed no photos of his 1991 talks with the Dalai Lama. Bill Clinton avoided formal sessions altogether, choosing instead to drop by the Dalai Lama's other meetings. George W. Bush kept his meetings under wraps, too. But in 2007, he broke with tradition and appeared in public with the Dalai Lama to present him with the Congressional Gold Medal at the Capitol.