I'm not at all surprised by the lack of information flow and there is nothing nefarious or suspicious about it. The guys and gals working on this are mostly highly technical types - i.e. stereotypically nerds/geeks - working in a very stressful environment. They are very very aware of how critical things are and are wearing themselves out trying to pick out the best choices from a series of bad answers.

Even if some of them were good at communicating to non-technical people before this, they are not going to "waste" the time/effort required for this non-critical task when they could be working on resolving the problem (or sleeping). I work with a large group of engineers in a safety critical field (not nuclear power) and the thought of taking them out of a high stress situation and dropping them into a press conference every couple of hours only brings really bad images to mind (as in english major vs engineer discussion of higher level math ).

The concept of a panel is straight out of how NASA handles things and yes NASA hires, plans and trains for that expectation to the point that the talking heads (i.e. the panel) usually aren't actually working the problem just translating techno speak into something approaching everyday language. To layer that expectation on other high tech tasks, especially during a "crisis" is unrealistic, though I would love additional real data just like everyone else.

- Eric