Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, delivered the tenth annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on October 17, 2017, entitled “Government Secrecy in the Age of Information Overload."

"We have to remember that we prize transparency not for its own sake, but because of its connection to other democratic values, like reasoned political discourse and official accountability. Disclosure can serve these values, but it can also undermine them. It would be difficult to make the case that President Trump’s purported transparency is serving these values. If this is transparency at all, it’s a transparency we should distrust and interrogate rather than applaud. "  

Read a transcript of the comments at the Shorenstein Center.