NYT Reporter on the Current Controls at CDC: Sad and Scary

At a session at the September Society of Professional Journalists’ meeting, long-time New York Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. said:

“I have never seen the CDC so paralyzed in 20 years of covering them. And it is sad and scary.

“Even under the Obama Administration they had to clear anything important through HHS. But now, I mean, I have never seen it like this, where they don’t hold a press conference in order to announce a major change they are making in guidelines. They sort of slip it onto the website without telling anybody. And it comes to our attention on the quiet.

“And then when we ask for an explanation of: ‘Why are you using .60 infection fatality rate or why did you change the guideline about who should be tested, they don’t want to answer the questions. So if you don’t talk to people off the record, you don’t talk to anyone because nobody is being allowed to say anything on the record unless it has be cleared through [Health and Human Services Secretary] Alex Azar’s office, if you are talking basically about HHS or CDC. Or through the White House. So, it is a horrible experience for a journalist trying to get life -saving information out of your own government.”

From KF: The question I have is why we, journalists, allowed ourselves to be put in the situation where we got only controlled conversations--in the Obama administration and before? Why did we not oppose the restraints or warn the public? 

Indeed, why wouldn't an institution that controlled public scrutiny of itself become a danger to the public? Why wouldn't what we don't know because the omnipresent PIOs be hazardous?

Journalists and All the Stories Not Told

Many reporters work hard and are highly skilled. Statements from a number of them leave a picture of journalists working until they can open some doors and shine light on important stuff. However, they often don't talk about the doors that remain closed. These are doors are locked by people in power using controls such as bans on staff speaking to reporters without the oversight by authorities, often PIOs.

Why aren't we talking about the doors that are still locked?

Below are some locked doors stories.

Scoop on a Hidden Database, But Never Permission To Talk to Staff People

Christina Jewett is winning awards for her extraordinary 2019 Kaiser Health News series that found the Food and Drug Administration had “let medical device companies file reports of injuries and malfunctions outside a widely scrutinized public database, which leave doctors and medical sleuths in the dark.”

The hidden alternative database had been in place nearly 20 years.
It took Jewett six months to do the story. During that time she worked with an agency PIO and she was never allowed to speak to a subject matter expert.

She got the story through Freedom of Information requests for documents and talking to outside experts, including a former FDA employee.

She said if she had been allowed to talk to insider experts the reporting would have been a much simpler or quicker process. But the agency makes experts available, she said, if it’s going to get flattering coverage.

Employees, Jewett said, are reminded not to speak to reporters without telling the journalists to go through the press office. And reporters sort of know, she said, that it’s frowned upon if a reporter tries to get in touch with an employee first.

NYT Reporter Said She Had Rarely Talked To EPA Career Employees for 10 years

Coral Davenport is a key reporter for the New York Times on the Environmental Protection Agency.

At a 2017 meeting at the National Press Club, she said, “In the past 10 years I have had almost zero access to career staff at EPA. Usually the way I find things out or get leaks is people who have recently left. People outside of EPA with close connections. They’ll talk to folks inside EPA.

“People in EPA have typically been absolutely petrified of speaking to the press. They will speak to someone one degree out or recently left.”

FDA and Off-Label Medications

For a 2018 story on off-label use of medications, a Washington Post reporter said FDA never allowed the journalists on the story to speak to anyone in the agency, despite repeated requests.

Ten Years to Nail Down FDA Failure

Katherine Eban’s 2019 book “Bottle of Lies,” a jaw-dropping look at failure in the FDA on generic drugs, is on several best books lists. When my editorial came out in Medpage talking about the “PIO Censorship,” Eban tweeted that muzzling of government scientists was the reason it took 10 years to write the book.

Unborn FDA Newsletters

Jim Dickinson has had a newsletter company, which includes FDA Webview, focusing on that agency for several decades. He says, “I couldn’t have started my company under the limits now in place -- I'd have had nothing to sell but what everyone else already had in a glutted marketplace: approved FDA info.”

Brechner Center: It's Illegal, But State Universities Gag Athletes

It’s illegal for public universities to gag athletes from speaking to the media and yet that is frequently what they do, says a new report from Brechner Center for Freedom of Information.

In a summary on the Poynter website, the authors say, “Yet for athletes at many of the nation’s top athletic programs, talking to the news media is regarded as a punishable offense. Players caught giving interviews without their athletic department’s approval — about any topic, even one unrelated to sports — can be punished with sanctions including withdrawal of their scholarships, ending their college careers.”

The project found that 86 percent of rulebooks from 58 state universities that compete in the NCAA’s elite Division I forbade athletes from speaking to journalists without permission.

The article lays out the arguments as to why these restrictions are illegal.

It also says, “When athletes’ interactions with the press and public are filtered through university image-minders, wrongdoing will go undetected and multiply.”

Although it’s not discussed in the Poynter article, the same can be said of Congress, federal, state and local agencies, schools, police departments and the many other types of institutions that have instituted these controls.