Jim Dickinson: “They want to control everything
that is said about how they’re doing their jobs. We journalists are not in the
business of giving them control. We’re just in the business of telling the
truth.”
From
Kathryn Foxhall: I did this interview with Jim Dickinson, editor of the
newsletter “FDA WebView,” in November 2021 as part of the research for an
article on gag rules and “Censorship by PIO.”
I’m
publishing the longer version now as the controls on reporters seem to grow
more pervasive, but a recent legal
win shows there are things journalists can do.
I edited the
interview slightly for length and clarity, with suggestions from Dickinson.
Dickinson
continues to edit “FDA WebView.”
COMING TO AMERICA
Jim Dickinson:
I came to America in 1974 from Australia where they had very stringent police
state types of controls on the press. And one of the reasons I came to America
was to enjoy the freedom to the First Amendment which is unique in the world.
No other country has anything equivalent to the First Amendment.
In
Australia, it was – and still is, to the best of my knowledge – the case that
government employees are not permitted to talk to the media. The only person
who is permitted to talk to the media for a government department is the cabinet-level
minister in charge of that department.
Just
Walking the FDA Halls
Well, when
I came to the United States in 1974, I was just staggered at the difference. I
could go into FDA and talk to anybody I liked. Nobody really cared that I was
in the building. There were five of us, I think, or six, who worked for
newsletters. So mass media was not very much interested in FDA. We were the
ones who regularly prowled the corridors for our respective employers, looking
for anything that we thought would make a story of interest to our readers.
And we
developed friendships with some of the more cooperative employees of the FDA.
And we came to terms with them as to when they were off the record and when
they were on the record. When we were on background and when we were not on
background. [And] when we could come back.
I could
just walk into anybody’s office and ask the secretary is so and so in and she
would either go on the intercom or go into the office and say, “Jim Dickinson’s
here. Do you want to see him?” And let me in. Sometimes, in fact, quite
frequently, I would go into that office, or any office I wanted, to ask
questions in, and the secretary wasn’t there. So, I let myself into the office.
I would knock on the door. Sometimes I’d interrupt a meeting. I’d apologize and
agree to come back later. But that’s the way it was.
……
Well, the
press office in those days was operated under a totally different set of rules
to what it is operated under today. Their job was to deal only with the mass
media. They were only interested in dealing with high profile matters that
might involve their bosses or the administration in some difficulty because of
the vast outreach of the mass media. So that’s what they were set up to do.
We in the
lowly trade press were expected to fend for ourselves and go around and get our
own news. They were big picture people and we were little picture people. Our
readers were basically beneath their contempt.
Walking
Parklawn Building
[The
Parklawn Building] had 23 stories of FDA offices.…In those days each elevator
lobby on each floor had a large, conveniently flat-topped trash can. And I
would put my newsletters in a small stack on each trash can…as I went up, and
sometimes some mischief makers would take the whole bundle and stick it inside
the trash. But basically, that’s the way I got my reputation in the building.
My products were free to everybody who was lucky enough to grab one of those
newsletters….And people liked me. People liked the other five guys [newsletter
reporters]….working there.
The Mass Media Outlets
New York
Times, Wall Street Journal and…Washington Post and television stations, they
weren’t interested in routine, everyday regular coverage of FDA. They only went
there when there were big blockbuster stories going on.
But it was
the press office’s job to intercept them and to escort them and make sure they
didn’t get out of their depth....
The ethic
of the press office in those days was to help the working journalists in the
building. Help them get what they wanted….They weren’t there to obstruct,
obscure hide or conceal or massage and control the news…. And it was so in other
federal buildings, because the press officer or director of media affairs or
whatever it was, was usually a former working journalist….
[The mass
media outlets] wanted all the help they could get. Interest of the mass media
in FDA was transitory, at best. There weren’t any major ongoing issues that
interested them in those days. I was there for years and years and years, but
mass media journalists were not.
Generic Drug Scandal of the 1980s
And you
know, a scandal like the Generic Drug Scandal would arouse a lot of interest
I remember
the day that story broke. I was walking the halls of FDA. In fact, I was on the
way to the generic drug office just by pure coincidence. And I heard these
RUNNING FOOTSTEPS in the corridor behind me and there was Bob Wetherall, the
Associate Commissioner for Legislative Affairs pounding down the hall behind me
just as I noticed the lead investigator from the House Oversight Investigations
Committee, hurrying toward me from the Office of Generic Drugs with a bundle of
folders under his arm. Bob began bellowing at the investigator: “You can’t do
this. You know you can’t do this. Just walk in and take our documents.” And
[the investigator] turned around as the elevator arrived with a big smug smile,
full of teeth, saying, “We’re doing it,” and skipped adroitly into the
elevator.
FDA
employees had been picking favorites among generic drug companies. For
bribes--they were bribed--to advance their applications through the approval
process while retarding their competitors’ applications. This was a huge
scandal….
There was
an FDA employee in Generic Drugs who interested me quite a lot because, I
think, he had something to hide and that made him anxious. He was one of my
regular calls. His name was Charlie Chang [branch chief in the FDA generic drug
division] and he was in charge of applications in the Office of Generic Drugs.
Charlie Chang was not literally, but figuratively, in bed with one particular
generic drug company. And it was his files that were seized that day. They
caught him red-handed and he went to jail. And there were several others. It
went on for years. The repercussions, the trials and all that.
Then all
of the mass media were suddenly riveted on the minutiae of FDA processes and
whether they were adequately secure, who was watching who and all that sort of
thing.…
That was
one way that the mass media began to wake up to FDA. And the Wall Street
Journal was the first major news outlet to appoint a reporter whose job it was
to monitor FDA news. They had never dedicated a single employee to do this on a
24/7 sort of basis before. No major, major news organization did. Only the
trade press did.
Gradually
the fact that the generic drug program could be corrupted by regulated industry
was not lost on the people who broke that story on Capitol Hill....
The
Capitol Hill investigators were thinking. “Well, those drug people are doing
this kind of stuff, what about the medical device people?” And sure enough,
they discovered and unearthed stuff going on with medical devices. That was
that way where people were doing favors for some companies at the expense of
other companies. That came several years later.
Denied Press Credentials
In 1996,
the whole open sieve that was FDA was shut down in the name of security because
of the Oklahoma City bombing. Then 9/11 came along, and anything that wasn’t
already shut down, then got shut down. And as the vise began to close on my
activities there, I raised several issues with management. In fact, the FDA
Policy Board met and agreed to hear my case. I wanted FDA to start issuing
press passes to regular media people who were like me, there every day trying
to gather news….I cited the example of the Pentagon. They have press passes.
The Department of State has press passes…. This woman Associate Commissioner
for Management at the Policy Board meeting with me …. She whispered to me out
the side of her mouth as she was shuffling past me to return to her office (it was
kind of tight at the end of the table at the door): “Over my dead body.”
Denied
Ability to Call
Kathryn Foxhall:
What about the thing about not being able to call anybody without going through
the press office?
Jim
Dickinson: Well, that happened very slowly. I was at a meeting once.…I went up
to [an FDA presenter] afterwards and asked him…specific questions. And he said
he was in a hurry, to give him a call at the office later that day. So, I did
exactly that. By that time, something had happened inside his office. He was
not aware of it before. But his secretary had been instructed that all
inquiries must go through the press office. And I said, “I’ve just been at this
meeting with him and he said to call him this afternoon.” And she just dug her
heels in and said, “No, you have to go to the press office. There is no
exception.”
….
And Not Getting Through to Your
Source at All
Kathryn
Foxhall: What about getting through? Even after you go through the press
office, what about getting through to the press to the person you’re trying to
speak to?
Jim
Dickinson: Well, that became increasingly more difficult. The press officer,
the PIO, would want to know all your questions first. And then they would
deflect your approach by saying, “We’ll get back to you.” When WE get back to
you, it’s not the person you’re trying to interview, that you’ve prepared the
questions to ask that person. It’s the press officer, again, the PIO. And they
generally do it in a cherry-picking sort of way where they answer some of the
questions in their own way. They ignore other questions that you presented. And
they give you not enough detail in the answers that they do provide. And if you
want to have a second go at it, it becomes almost like trying to push a
snowball up a hill. It gets very difficult. They don’t have enough time to
expend on this one trade press reporter’s multiple questions to this one
individual. They’ve got other things going on.
Changing
to an Aggregator
Jim
Dickinson: I’m still editing FDANews every day.
Kathryn
Foxhall: And you’re still hearing the same thing from your reporters?
Jim
Dickinson: No. The whole picture has changed. Instead of us being originators
of FDA stories, which was what I started out doing, I’m now an aggregator of
FDA stories about itself. And other words, I’m gathering other people’s
products and aggregating them into an overnight bulletin, which our people
[Dickinson’s subscribers] can pursue at their own discretion by following the
embedded links that we put in the stories that go to FDA documents or to
lawsuits or whatever else source document might be.
The nature
of what I publish is completely changed, which has given me a rather cynical
idea of the First Amendment, because the First Amendment’s literal words are:
Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of the press. Well, I think my
freedom has been abridged. If you want to fall back on the nitpickers here, it
wasn’t Congress that did it. It was the FDA bureaucrats and they’re not
Congress. They did it.
Kathryn
Foxhall: But Congress funds the FDA every year.
Lawsuit
Jim
Dickinson: Of course, but that’s one step removed from the actual wording and
you get weaker and weaker as you attempt to argue this.
As a
matter of fact, I prepared a lawsuit against FDA on exactly these grounds. I
also filed a petition which took three years to answer in voluminous detail in
a way that—surprise, surprise—found [that] FDA won.
But the
lawsuit was pro bono by a prominent Washington law firm and they spent a year
and a half researching what grounds they could have to bring a case for
reporters’ right of access to government employees. And they came up with this
legal theory – which I think has to be faulty and wrong somehow, but I couldn’t
get past it – that I needed to have a number, preferably a number, or even one,
FDA employee who was willing to get up on the stand in federal court and say, “I’d
be happy to talk to a reporter if my boss would let me. But my boss will not
let me.” Well, that’s the very antithesis of the pact that I as a working
journalist have made for years and years with all of my sources. “Thou shall
not be betrayed. I will not expose you. You can tell me stuff and you will
never be hurt by it.” And now I have to go to these employees and say, “Would
you go on the stand and say....[laughing].” It’s not going to happen. And it
didn’t happen.
…..
But that
was [the attorney’s] problem: I had to find a willing talker in FDA. And I did
find one who dickered on it. She was in the Detroit district office. And I just
couldn’t persuade her to do it. She wavered. At the time she was worried about
her retirement in two years and whether she would be hurt in some way. Anyway,
she bailed out. [Editor’s note: Legal analysis
from Frank LoMonte has now said that journalists can now sue on their own
accord. Investigative reporter Brittany Hailer did so and won a favorable
settlement with good First Amendment language.]
Getting
Most Stories from Documents
Jim
Dickinson: It’s worse than Australia. I left Australia to enjoy the benefits of
the First Amendment here in America. And I did enjoy them for years and years
and years and built my company on it. And now it’s worse than Australia ever
was.
Kathryn
Foxhall: How many reporters do you have working for you?
Jim
Dickinson: Two.
Kathryn
Foxhall: And in general, would you say you get your sources from documents?
Jim
Dickinson: Yes
Kathryn Foxhall:
And what about advisory meetings?
Jim
Dickinson: No, we don’t personally attend anything. Advisory Committee
meetings? Yes. If they are on the internet. If FDA holds a meeting on the
internet and we’re interested in it, we’ll cover it.
Kathryn
Foxhall: Would you say it, like this [business] is viable, because if you do
this as a service for people who are interested, it is worth their money [for]
a subscription? Because theoretically they could go through all this stuff
themselves. But it’s a service to go through all the documents, pick out the
important....
Virtually No Talking to People In
FDA
Jim
Dickinson: We aggregate all the things that we think our readership base would
be interested in and present it to them overnight each day in a single,
solitary document that they can then follow up themselves with hyperlinks that
we embed in the text.
Kathryn
Foxhall: So, would you say there is virtually no talking to people in FDA?
Jim
Dickinson: Oh, absolutely. If we communicate with FDA, and it is always by
email, that gives FDA’s PIOs the option to ignore us. You know, even the PIOs
have dragons at the gate to screen out reporters who want to get to talk to the
PIO. [The person who answers the phone], says, “And who’s calling?” And you say
who you are, and then they look you up on a list, see if you’re one of the
admitted ones. And then depending on what that listing shows, tells them, you
really get through, or you get asked to submit your questions in writing.
Kathryn
Foxhall: You communicate by email because you have to. That’s the only way they
will really answer you. Is that correct?
Jim Dickinson: That’s right.
Kathryn
Foxhall: So, you just do it all the time. I mean, you don’t even give it a shot
anymore, about getting on the phone.
Jim Dickinson: We don’t get to the original expert source in FDA. We never get
to talk to them. Ever.
What’s Happening After a Reporter
Goes to FDA
Kathryn
Foxhall: What do you think is happening when you send in whatever it is – questions
or whatever – to the FDA offices and they can take whatever time they want to
take. What is happening there, behind closed doors?
Jim
Dickinson: I think they determine whether this is worth the agency’s time doing
anything with it in the first place. If they think it is worth the agency’s
time, the expenditure of taxpayer dollars on pursuing for you, then they will
go to a source of their choice. It might not be the one you want. It would be somebody
that they think is better from the agency’s point of view. For instance, if I
wanted to ask Janet Woodcock [FDA’s former Principal Deputy Commissioner, who retired
this year] about something that she said at a meeting that
we were covering, then I would have to go to the PIO and say I want to talk to
Janet Woodcock about what she said. And they would want to know exactly what it
was I wanted to ask Janet Woodcock. And this is my suspicion: I have no
documentary, established verification of this. But my suspicion is that they:
A: They either know somebody who assists Janet Woodcock on these kinds of
issues and they go to them. Or they already know from some source on this
particular topic and they regurgitate it back to me in an email. The chances of
me actually getting my question through to Janet Woodcock, for her personal
attention and her personal answer is pretty remote.
Kathryn
Foxhall: So that you would be able to talk to her and maybe do a follow-up
question and quote her directly – it’s just is not going to happen.
Jim
Dickinson: Well, there’s two ways you could approach that. One you’ve got one
question that arose out of what she told the meeting this afternoon, which can
be fairly simply dealt with, probably by other people besides Janet Woodcock,
in the opinion of the PIO. And the other possibility is that you have a list of
questions you want to put to Janet Woodcock that were spurred in your mind by
what she said…. and you are requesting an interview with those questions. And
that is when the PIO will dig their feet in and say, “What sort of questions
exactly? Can you give me an idea what they are?”
Now, I’ve
done this before, and I know it doesn’t work: [I might say], “Well, some of
them are questions that would be better expressed after I’d heard her answer to
the first question.” In other words, I need to have a conversation.
….
And you’ll
never get it.
What
About the Lower-Level People?
Kathryn
Foxhall: And I guess one excuse [the agency might give] there is that Janet
Woodcock is busy. But could you, if you so wanted, talk to anybody in that
office, or someone you knew is not all THAT busy. Just someone who maybe spoke
at a meeting or whatever. But…they have expertise in a particular area. And
they’re not like Janet Woodcock. They’re not being targeted by the press everyday.
Could you talk to them?
Jim
Dickinson: I haven’t tried to, lately. I’ve been so, frankly, discouraged that
I don’t. It’s unlikely that such a person would come under notice. The
lower-level people you’re referring to generally are speaking off a script. And
the PIO’s job is to hold you to the script. And they’ll be happy to send you a
copy of it by email. But as for you asking free-ranging questions based on what
this lower-level person said, they get nervous. They don’t know that this
lower-level person really can be trusted to stick to the party line and say
what has been approved in the script. Or will you, as a clever reporter, trick
them into going off script and say things that maybe they should not say. So
that’s the atmosphere that now exists between reporters and PIOs.
It’s an
untrusting atmosphere. And it comes from the PIO side far more than the
reporter’s side. The reporter, after all, is merely trying to finish the story
they’re already working on. And they’re not playing games. They don’t want to
play games. But the PIO, to protect the boss, to protect the agency, in their
mind, has to play games. And they play these sorts of games. Reroute your
question. They ignore certain parts of your question. They ignore a whole
question as they want or they pick out some text that’s come out of a document
that’s been previously approved on this topic. And although it doesn’t fit your
question, exactly, it’ll do a good enough job of addressing the subject your
question was about.
Kathryn Foxhall:
Let’s set a scenario where you know what you’re doing. You have seen a
document. You’ve been at a meeting. So, you know, that this particular
person--not real low, but not Janet Woodcock either--this person has a focus on
and knows about this area. Could you talk to him or her if you went through the
PIO?
Jim
Dickinson: It’s not impossible. I haven’t had the pleasure, though. They have a
very, very well-worn way of deflecting such approaches.
Kathryn Foxhall: You’re saying it’s
unlikely.
Jim Dickinson: It’s unlikely.
Highly unlikely.
What’s
It Doing to Reporting?
Kathryn
Foxhall: What do you think that it’s doing to reporting about FDA across the
board?
Jim
Dickinson: It’s dumbing it down. Reporters, I don’t know many of the current
world-level reporters but reporters...generic journalists don’t find FDA a very
interesting subject in the first place. And in the second place, they don’t
have the kind of technological understanding of the issues, technological or
legal understanding of the issues that FDA deals with every day. It takes a lot
of experience on a reporter’s part to learn those technological and legal,
regulatory type issues and to become proficient. And the more proficient you
are, the more you begin to outstrip the PIO in the level of knowledge that’s
being discussed, and the more wary they become of you….
I have
been reporting FDA since 1974. And I know so much about the way the agency
works, although my information may not be as current as it used to be. I have a
reputation with some of the old timers there that maybe they don’t want to
hassle with me. They’ve got better things to do. And they would rather deal
with reporters who know less and who will more readily accept the printed
handout, the script that they prepared and not give them any trouble…. I think
it’s true of government generally. The less familiar the reporters are, the
more easily they’re brushed aside and the more grateful they might be, to have
some sort of quote, even if it’s not a high caliber quote, to put in their
story and get it over with and go on to the next story. So, I think the PIO
system in a nutshell has resulted in a general dumbing down of the public’s
knowledge of how FDA works. And the rationale behind many of its decisions, if
not all of its decisions, it’s opaque. FDA is opaque.
Kathryn
Foxhall: Would you say that it’s keeping information from the general public
and also from people who are more focused on this, like people in Congress. It’s
simply keeping critical information from them?
Jim
Dickinson: Yes. It’s not intended to have that effect, but it does have that
effect.
Kathryn
Foxhall: Well, okay, when you say it’s not intended to have that effect: would
you say that there could be times that it is intended to have that effect?
Jim
Dickinson: Certainly, certainly. You get bad actors in there. Yes.
Foxhall: Several
years ago Christina Jewett, then with Kaiser Health News, poured some time into
a story about a medical devices database,
which FDA had and it was not telling the public about. With defects or issues
or problems, they were supposed to have a public database. Well, they had a
secret one and they had it for almost 20 years. She did a whole series.
When it came out, it blew up. But she got that story originally because someone
in that office retired and then became a whistleblower.
Jim Dickinson: That’s the way it goes.
Kathryn
Foxhall: SPJ gave her an award. I think she got several other awards for it. I
agree that she deserved them given the work and the talent….But none of us, the
whole journalism community, stepped back and said, “My God, this went on for 20
years and we didn’t know anything about it. We give an award for people finally
getting it. Also, we didn’t step back and say well, as far as we know, there
could be 20 databases that we don’t know anything about.” Is that an adequate
picture of where we are?
What We Don’t Get
Jim
Dickinson: Yes, I’m afraid it is. I’m
afraid it is. The agency has become opaque. You’ve got no idea the number of
stories that I got from people telling me just a little piece of it and another
person telling me a little piece of the other side of it. And gradually over a
period of time when I was talking to these people, they were, all of them,
telling me stuff they had no business telling me. Their bosses would not like
them telling me, but I got told. And I was able to put things together and the
bosses didn’t like it. In fact, long after I had left and the system had gotten
into place, [there was] a good contact of mine who was Associate Commissioner
for Policy. Somebody I always called on every time I went into the building. He
was retired. He told me on the phone, “Jim, he said, if they could have stopped
you, they would have.” Well, they have [laughing]. Big bosses didn’t like it.
They have got control fetishes. They want to control everything that is said
about how they’re doing their jobs. We journalists are not in the business of
giving them control. We’re just in the business of telling the truth.
Kathryn Foxhall:
Let me just show you how far my thinking has gone and see if you think it’s
legitimate or whatever. I also talked to Katherine Eban who wrote, “Bottle of
Lies.”
She got
numerous awards…and she testified before Congress. [I told her] reporters used
to call whoever they wanted and often talk to them. I said sometimes staff
people were nervous, but there was a sense of obligation that you answer a
question from the public. She was flabbergasted...Her book was basically about
how very bad the overseas inspections are.... But in total, she spent 10 years
on this book.
Now, my
feeling is, this is a symptom of implosion. We have to have a reporter spend 10
years on a subject matter before we really realize what is going on. And you
know, if FDA implodes, what do we have? We are in this technological age—with
pandemics and other things—and we are in such trouble. And if they lose their
trust, we are just in deep trouble as a society.
Jim
Dickinson: Well, I think we’re in deep trouble as a society on other fronts as
well.
Kathryn
Foxhall: Certainly.
Editor’s note: For a view on what happened
in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the controls tightened see
the
interview with a former CDC communications director.