It’s very simple. Government agencies that issue distorted information in a time of crisis lose credibility and end up appearing incompetent. Even federal bureaucracies eventually learn this. Take the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster for example. Last week CBS News reported that the U.S. Department of the Interior misrepresented findings from the independent scientific assessments of the oil leakage rate. The Department’s press release said the scientists estimated leakage to fall within a range of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil per day. 
Yet the scientists had submitted this range as an estimate only of the best case scenario (the lower bound of their overall estimate). They had yet to come up with the worst case estimates (the upper bound), an important fact omitted from the original press release. This led CBS News to accuse the government of “sugar coating” the estimates.
In the library world, however, this lesson has yet to be fully appreciated… [Read more]
