PRESS RELEASE
-For Immediate Release-
September 10, 2008

Contact: Brian Gumm, (202) 683-4812, bgumm@ombwatch.org

Thomas Blanton Wins Award for Outstanding Public Interest Work

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10, 2008—OMB Watch is pleased to announce that Thomas Blanton, Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, has won a Public Interest Hall of Fame Award for his outstanding public interest work in the Washington area and on the national and international stage. Blanton is a native of Georgia and is a graduate of Harvard University.

The Public Interest Hall of Fame Awards are part of OMB Watch's year-long 25th Anniversary celebration and honor the "unsung heroes" who have made their mark in making the world a better place and will leave an important legacy. Public Interest Hall of Fame Award winners will be recognized at OMB Watch's 25th Anniversary event in Washington, DC, the evening of Sept. 17.

Blanton was nominated for this award because his colleagues consider him to be a driving force behind a wide range of government openness and accountability initiatives. He has supported the work of countless other organizations on the local, state, federal, and international levels, and his willingness to create partnerships and support the work of other groups has magnified the impact of his own work to support open government.

Upon learning of the award, Blanton said, "In my small way, I've been on a parallel path with OMB Watch these last 25 years, shining light into dark corners of government." He continued, "Instead of singing their own well-deserved praises, here they are celebrating 25 years in the public interest by praising others — and on behalf of all my colleagues at the National Security Archive, I am deeply honored and grateful."

Gary D. Bass, Executive Director of OMB Watch, offered his congratulations. "Tom does extraordinary work at the National Security Archive, and his efforts have had a significant impact in all parts of the world. Tom brings wit and creativity to solving serious problems of government transparency. If 'information is the currency of democracy,' as Thomas Jefferson once said, then Tom Blanton should be hailed as a leader in democracy. His energy, effectiveness, and legacy in pursing the public's right to know is a key reason OMB Watch is proud to present him with one of seven Public Interest Hall of Fame Awards."

The full list of award winners is available at /files/25th. There were roughly 100 nominees considered for the award. For more information about OMB Watch, see http://www.ombwatch.org/article/archive/250.

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Thomas Blanton Bio

Thomas S. "Tom" Blanton is the Director (since 1992) of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University, Washington D.C. (www.nsarchive.org), and the series editor of the Archive's award-winning Web, CD, book, and microform publications totaling more than 500,000 pages of declassified documents. The Archive won the 1999 George Polk Award for "piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy."

Blanton's books include White House E-Mail (New York: The New Press, 1995, 254 pp. + computer disk), which the New York Times described as "a stream of insights into past American policy, spiced with depictions of White House officials in poses they would never adopt for a formal portrait." He co-authored The Chronology (New York: Warner Books, 1987, 687 pp.) on the Iran-contra affair, and served as a contributing author to three editions of the ACLU's authoritative guide, Litigation Under the Federal Open Government Laws, and to the Brookings Institution study Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1998, 680 pp.).

A graduate of Bogalusa (La.) High School and Harvard University, he won Harvard's 1979 Newcomen Prize in History and served as an editor of the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.

He filed his first Freedom of Information request in 1976 as a newspaper reporter in Minnesota. His articles have been published in USA Today, International Herald-Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Slate, Foreign Policy, and many other publications. He has appeared on hundreds of national broadcasts ranging from ABC News Nightline to NPR's All Things Considered to CNN's Situation Room to Comedy Central's Colbert Report. He serves as managing editor of the international network of Freedom of Information advocates, www.freedominfo.org, as co-chair of the public interest coalition OpenTheGovernment.org, and on the boards of the National Coalition for History and the H-DIPLO electronic bulletin board, among many other professional activities.

His honors include the 1996 James Madison Award Honorary Citation (American Library Association), the 2005 Emmy Award for outstanding television news and documentary research (National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences), and the 2007 Knowledge Trust award for access to information (University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill).

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OMB Watch is a nonprofit government watchdog organization dedicated to promoting government accountability, citizen participation in public policy decisions, and the use of fiscal and regulatory policy to serve the public interest