Kudos to the Sacramento Bee and Kansas City Star for outstanding editorials on the new regulations imposed by the federal government on the National Practitioner Data Bank’s Public Use File.

The Sacramento Bee: The Obama administration came into office promising openness. Now, the administration has positioned itself on the side of protecting the privacy of doctors who maim patients.

It also seeks to act as a Nixonian monitor, watching how reporters go about their business. President Obama once taught constitutional law. He ought to reread the First Amendment.

The Kansas City Star: A federal agency may have thought it was tamping out a brushfire when it partially restored public access to a website containing important data on the malpractice and disciplinary histories of doctors.

But the move by the Health Resources and Services Administration, known as HRSA, contains restrictions that display an appalling disrespect for journalists and researchers and for the public’s right to gain information about the doctors to whom they entrust their health and safety.

For more on this controversy, check out the Association of Health Care Journalists’ interactive timeline on the topic.