Saturday, April 12, 2025

To Journalism History Meeting: Gag Rules, Censorship by PIO and Slide into Authoritarianism

This is the written version of my talk to Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference, March 28.

Since the 1980s there has been a surge in federal agencies and many other entities banning employees from speaking to journalists without notifying authorities, often through public information officers. Often reporters are not allowed speak to the person they request at all.

Glen Nowak, a former Chief of Media Relations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with many years at the agency, has said that presidential administrations have handed down restraints on what may be said and who reporters may talk to, with intense examinations of individual contacts; that the rules have tightened with every president since at least Clinton; and that the controls are explicitly political. Nowak said, “Government and elected officials have seen that controls make it harder,” for journalists to do stories officials don’t like, and therefore they “diminish the visibility and prevalence of those stories. So, from their perspective, it works.”

I have been on the Right to Know Committee of the Association of Health Care Journalists since a decade prior to the pandemic. Things were so bad that the committee members regularly met with the HHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs to request that reporters be allowed to speak to the HHS staff members whom they requested after going through the censorship process, starting with the public information office.

On the Committee we argued with each other repeatedly because I said we should be pushing for unfettered contact, with reporters contacting who they wished without notifying any authority. I was told that we could not possibly ask for that. That would be just a game stopper from the outset.

Look at that, please: The press is supposed to be watchdogs for the public.

In reality, we cannot, and we did not, even approach the authorities to ask if we might talk to people normally. That includes people in our major institution in charge of preventing mass death from infectious disease.

As a reporter who spent over 14 years talking to federal staff before the PIO/guard system was implemented, I have zero doubt that the manipulation and blockage in the later years was one cause of the poor performance that exacerbated the pandemic. Given the deadly history of information control, why wouldn’t it be?

I want to be direct about what my real question is: Why isn’t this apocalyptic?

The blockages are still in effect in HHS, meaning that all 80,000 staff are under these constraints not to speak to reporters, even as future catastrophes are inevitable.

These controls have also become quite common in agencies and other entities across the country. The Society of Professionals Journalists sponsored surveys from 2012-2016 of the restraints in federal, state and local governments; education; science; and police departments. They showed the controls were pervasive.

SPJ and other journalism groups have opposed the controls for over a decade. Letters signed by up to 60 groups have gone to the last three administrations. SPJ led a group of journalists to talk to people in the Obama White House in 2015.

In an important development, foundational thinking for journalists themselves taking legal action against constraints was provided by First Amendment attorney Frank LoMonte, currently Co-Chair of the Free Speech and Free Press Committee of the American Bar Association.

LoMonte said: “Media plaintiffs should be able to establish that their interests have been injured, whether directly or indirectly, to sustain a First Amendment challenge to government restraints on employees’ speech to the media.”

Last year investigative journalist Brittany Hailer won a settlement, with strong First Amendment language, supporting employees’ and contractors’ right to speak to reporters. Hailer had filed action against the don’t-talk restrictions in the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, which had an alleged high rate of inmate deaths. Last month a second excellent ruling came down, allowing a New York newspaper to move forward with such a case.

Many attorneys and others had previously thought journalists could not bring such cases against gag rules on their own accord.

Nevertheless, few journalists or news outlets have taken serious action against these constraints. With amazing consistency journalists say something like, “Good reporters get the story anyway.” This is in the face of the fact that many stories on malfeasance emerge only after many years of harming people, public programs or our way of life.

The New York Times published the story about the fact the head of the FDA medical device division had worked under important conflict of interest for 15 years.

Look at that the other way around: For 15 years the entire press corps was oblivious to that situation that many people certainly knew about.

Maybe it’s critical that we should go back to talking to people without the authorities’ interference?

In other examples, for at least 20 years people were tortured by a Mississippi sheriff’s department “goon squad.” There were major problems with the overseas manufacture of generic drugs. It took the author 10 years to get the story, she said, in part because FDA scientists could not speak. The first Trump administration’s plan for separating children from their families was put together while reporters were not allowed in HHS. The Atlantic’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story got the details five years later.

It’s my estimation that the majority of enterprise or investigative stories--- impressive though they often are---cover things that have been successfully kept out of journalists’ sight for a long time.

We get stuff, despite the controls. Journalists often get impressive material: careful, truthful, and addressing things the public want to know.

However, how do we know we get five percent of what is 1) important and 2) not open to us, particularly with the authorities mandating that we never hear a word without their controls on it?

Why do any of us think so?

The press critic Jay Rosen says, “The news system is not designed for human understanding. Even at top providers, it's designed to produce a flow of new content today--and every day."

It’s like reeling in fish over a 25-foot wall. We know nothing about the ocean, we can’t even see it or much of what is in it, but we get more than enough nice stuff to make a living. So we don’t fight the wall.

Much more work is needed on how the journalism culture of acquiescence to these controls has arisen, the impact it has on democracy and human welfare, and the question of whether it is enabling autocracy.

I’d just beg that people ask these questions quickly because right now insiders are silenced even as humans endure oppression, and the catastrophes, like maybe a larger pandemic, are headed toward us.


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