Since reporters' contact with agencies is choked down, choked off and prohibited without oversight, who is watching these entities with so much power over our well-being?
On July 28, I testified before the listening session of the Office of Science and Technology Policy on the restraints on reporters in federal agencies. The written version is below.
This came after 25 journalism and other groups wrote to OSTP calling for elimination of the bans on federal employees speaking to reporters without notifying authorities, including public information officers.
Written testimony: Over the last two to three decades agencies in the federal government, like entities elsewhere, have implemented rules that ban employees from speaking to journalists without notifying authorities, often by going through public information officers.
This means in essence that no word can pass without people in power controlling it.
President Biden has been in Washington long enough to have known the days before this was the case and to have seen the transition in the agencies and Congress.
It is mean, ugly censorship. It is pervasive, it is human rights abuse and it is successful. Control of information by people in power has been one of the most debilitating, deadly things in all human history.
You should have the letter that 25 journalism and other groups have signed opposing these restrictions.
I have worked with the Society of Professional Journalists on this, but this statement is mine alone.
Please understand in many agencies reporters can’t go into the building. They cannot get credentials to do so even though thousands of employees do. Everyone in the agency is forbidden to speak to them without going to the public information officers, who have been made into our censors. When the reporter goes through the permission-to-speak process, from everything we hear, most of the time they are not allowed to speak to the person requested. In HHS the request has to go up three levels in the hierarchy. People in agencies have hidden discussions on whether to allow the contact and on what can be discussed. People in high positions block any contact they don’t want to happen.
As a 40-year reporter, if there is one thing I can get you to focus on it is that after journalists get the story through official avenues, there is always, routinely, more to the story. And we, the entire public, are walking in mine fields with all the hazards people are silenced about.
I was editor of the American Public Health Association’s newspaper during the very dark early days of AIDS. That was years before the agencies began the censorship. No one necessarily knew which reporter talked to which employee. In just one example, a fairly-highly placed official at CDC educated me about some basics, on the condition that his name not be used. That could have been worth a million lives eventually, given that we were still early in the infection spread and I was writing for public health professionals.
In contrast, the official story I would otherwise have written was interesting, accurate and insidiously curated, devoid of even basic facts that tended not to support the administration’s policies.
Thankfully, sometimes staff members today defy the rules and speak to reporters outside official avenues. However, it happens much less often because most contacts are banned and there are the censors on conversations.
Officials say they need to coordinate the information and that it is dangerous to let people just talk: they might say the wrong thing.
Coordinating the official story may be a legitimate function for agencies and offices.
However, despite all our divisions in this country, nobody wants to be allowed to hear only the story officials coordinate for them.
Free speech can be problematic, sloppy and dangerous. It has never been as dangerous as mechanisms people in power can use to control information according to their own inclinations.
Questions for the workgroup and OSTP:
---Why is it necessary to have such controls on staff members when it was not in the past?
---Why should people in official positions be allowed to implement such blockages on contacts?
---How do you know enough about the workings and character of agencies like CDC, NIH, FDA or EPA? How does anyone have a sufficient overview when the agencies control public scrutiny of themselves? Are there any independent persons watching for any of us, since the press is not there?
---Why would an agency with so little oversight not develop serious corrosion? What do we know about that? Why are we taking the risk?
---Since we know about these restrictions what responsibility do we have to the human lives that depend on these agencies?
This means in essence that no word can pass without people in power controlling it.
President Biden has been in Washington long enough to have known the days before this was the case and to have seen the transition in the agencies and Congress.
It is mean, ugly censorship. It is pervasive, it is human rights abuse and it is successful. Control of information by people in power has been one of the most debilitating, deadly things in all human history.
You should have the letter that 25 journalism and other groups have signed opposing these restrictions.
I have worked with the Society of Professional Journalists on this, but this statement is mine alone.
Please understand in many agencies reporters can’t go into the building. They cannot get credentials to do so even though thousands of employees do. Everyone in the agency is forbidden to speak to them without going to the public information officers, who have been made into our censors. When the reporter goes through the permission-to-speak process, from everything we hear, most of the time they are not allowed to speak to the person requested. In HHS the request has to go up three levels in the hierarchy. People in agencies have hidden discussions on whether to allow the contact and on what can be discussed. People in high positions block any contact they don’t want to happen.
As a 40-year reporter, if there is one thing I can get you to focus on it is that after journalists get the story through official avenues, there is always, routinely, more to the story. And we, the entire public, are walking in mine fields with all the hazards people are silenced about.
I was editor of the American Public Health Association’s newspaper during the very dark early days of AIDS. That was years before the agencies began the censorship. No one necessarily knew which reporter talked to which employee. In just one example, a fairly-highly placed official at CDC educated me about some basics, on the condition that his name not be used. That could have been worth a million lives eventually, given that we were still early in the infection spread and I was writing for public health professionals.
In contrast, the official story I would otherwise have written was interesting, accurate and insidiously curated, devoid of even basic facts that tended not to support the administration’s policies.
Thankfully, sometimes staff members today defy the rules and speak to reporters outside official avenues. However, it happens much less often because most contacts are banned and there are the censors on conversations.
Officials say they need to coordinate the information and that it is dangerous to let people just talk: they might say the wrong thing.
Coordinating the official story may be a legitimate function for agencies and offices.
However, despite all our divisions in this country, nobody wants to be allowed to hear only the story officials coordinate for them.
Free speech can be problematic, sloppy and dangerous. It has never been as dangerous as mechanisms people in power can use to control information according to their own inclinations.
Questions for the workgroup and OSTP:
---Why is it necessary to have such controls on staff members when it was not in the past?
---Why should people in official positions be allowed to implement such blockages on contacts?
---How do you know enough about the workings and character of agencies like CDC, NIH, FDA or EPA? How does anyone have a sufficient overview when the agencies control public scrutiny of themselves? Are there any independent persons watching for any of us, since the press is not there?
---Why would an agency with so little oversight not develop serious corrosion? What do we know about that? Why are we taking the risk?
---Since we know about these restrictions what responsibility do we have to the human lives that depend on these agencies?
