PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA brought so much hope for improvement of government transparency and press freedoms to Washington 10 months ago. But that hope is eroding as he backpedals on a federal shield law for journalists.

As a senator and a presidential candidate, Obama vowed his support of legislation creating the law, which would prevent reporters from being jailed for refusing to testify in U.S. courts. He even sponsored one of the bills.

But earlier this month, his administration sent Congress a memo calling for the most current version of the bill to be substantially weakened. Under Obama's proposal, reporters could still be forced to testify — and jailed, if they refuse — about leaks deemed to have a significant impact on national security.

What's more, judges would be instructed to show deference to federal prosecutors who claim the leaks were indeed significant.

That sounds more like Dick Cheney than Obama.

Protecting national security sources is in the public interest. Could the Iraq war have been averted if more people in the government told reporters how faulty the Bush administration's claims were about weapons of mass destruction?

Other than reporters in the Washington bureau of the former Knight Ridder newspaper chain, few news organizations aggressively dug into those claims during the run-up to the war. The New York Times eventually issued an apology to readers for its

Thirty-six states have shield laws that allow reporters to protect their sources by blocking both their court testimony and the subpoenaing of their notes. But with no federal law, U.S. Justice Department prosecutors can subpoena reporters to testify in federal court.

If they refuse — as former New York Times reporter Judith Miller did — they can end up in jail.

Reporters can only do so much if people won't talk to us, even on the deepest of background, or steer us toward documents.

The Bush administration — especially its first attorney general, John Ashcroft — made no secret that it would go after reporters' sources, including forcing reporters to testify. It was as much about scaring potential sources into silence as it was finding leakers.

The shutdown of information was vast, the sources who might have provided critical information about the Bush administration were silenced. The bigger the story, the bigger the risk. The biggest underreported stories with Bush were the war and the treatment of prisoners.

If a federal shield law had been in place, the reporting could have and would have been stronger.

In California and the other states that have shield laws that ban prosecutors from seeking reporters' testimony, a veteran journalist will explain the legal protections to a prospective source. It tells the source that the reporter knows his or her business. Any reporter ignorant of the legal rights to assure sources of confidentiality fails to serve the public to the highest potential.

Obama knows what a federal shield law will do: open the government to the best of things — more scrutiny.

It isn't enough to think, as some have, that Obama's U.S. Justice Department would find subpoenaing reporters onerous and simply decline to do it. The Nixon administration didn't do it very often, either. But then along came George W. Bush and Ashcroft.

Along with his shield law flip-flop, Obama's other policies on openness remain mixed.

He ordered an overhaul of compliance with the Freedom of Information Act — good, but reforms will take years. The FBI claims it can't even find its files on Walter Cronkite; the bureau continues to have an abysmal history of FOIA compliance.

The Obama administration puts out a lot of data on the spending of the public's money online. That's great.

But real government transparency only occurs when dusty file cabinets are jarred open and recalcitrant cultures are turned upside down. That's why a lot of people sent Obama to Washington. Change was his word and his promise.

But his position on the shield law is a promise badly broken.

Peele is an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group who has won numerous journalism awards for reporting on First Amendment issues. The Watchdog appears monthly. Reach him at tpeele@bayareanewsgroup.com.