This went to Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor in Chief, The Atlantic magazine, on May 9.
Mr.
Goldberg:
Thank
you so much for the story on the separation of the children and congratulations
on the Pulitzer Prize.
After
years of working with SPJ and others on the gag rules in agencies, etc., I’m
asking some “direct” questions, not just of you, but of many journalists.
Doesn’t
your separation story show that journalists have an obligation to be there in
the government agencies and to be talking to people without PIO or other
authorities monitoring? Or to be fighting like all hell to end the policies
that block that?
Isn’t
there a solid chance that this whole horror of human rights abuse would not
have happened if reporters had been there and had no censors on their
communications?
FYI,
an extensive review by Frank LoMonte,
prominent First Amendment attorney, says journalists can sue on this issue and
would have a great chance of winning.
Thanks
for your attention. Below is part of my email to The Atlantic from last fall
which explains more.
I
hope we can talk.
Thanks,
Kathryn Foxhall
Please
note:
Glen Nowak, a former CDC head of media relations and longtime communications
employee, has said that since the
1980s the restrictions on CDC staff have grown tighter with each presidential
administration; every contact is controlled up through the political levels;
and that this system “works” for officials in terms of suppressing information.
Over
the last 30-40 years there has been a trend in employers and others banning subordinates
from speaking to the press without oversight from authorities. This is often
done through a public information office.
My 2022 article in
the Columbia Journalism Review is on the history of this trend. I am a longtime
health reporter and serve as a sort of point person on the gag rules.
I wanted to ask the Atlantic in particular to consider this
because the story on child separation is very impressive. But as with so many
other stories, the whole situation probably could have been avoided had
reporters not been under such intense censorship: locked out of buildings and
facing thousands of staff people forbidden to talk to us. Is it ethical for any
of us to get such a story after the fact and not explain and fight the
restrictions on reporters?
The same is true of Covid. We now have
at least six million dead and virtually all 90
thousand people in HHS essentially silenced, as they have been for
years.
The
system looks like this: All employees are prohibited to speak to reporters
without oversight starting with the public information office. Then when a
reporter contacts PIOs for permission to talk to someone, the request must go
up through the political layers of government, at least to the HHS Secretary of
Public Affairs and often to the White House. Behind closed doors officials decide
who may speak to whom and what may be discussed.
From
all reports we have heard, most requests from reporters’ to speak to someone
are not granted.
The
situation is a horrific danger to human welfare. The conflict of interest for
agency leaders is overwhelming given they have controls over what journalists
can discern about them and their work. Informed
consent can hardly be real when the entire population is blocked from getting
independent perspective on what agencies do to impact them.
There is an excellent chance that specialized reporters, if they
had been free to network within the buildings or do normal communication could
have told an expert audience about the agency’s problems long before they
resulted in pandemic failures.
Please note among other things:
-- The
Society of Professional Journalists has said the controls
are censorship and authoritarian.
-- The extensive legal analysis from The
Brechner Center for Freedom of Information finds that
these constraints, although very common, are unconstitutional and many courts
have agreed with that. (The longer version is a legal
brief.)
-- Among many communications over years, 25 journalism and other groups wrote
to the Biden Administration’s Office of Science and
Technology Policy asking for elimination of such restrictions in the federal
government.
I hope we can talk.
Other Resources
-- Journalism groups’ FOI officers told the
New York Times, “The press should not be taking the risk of assuming that what
we get is all there is when so many people are silenced. We should be openly
fighting these controls.” The longer version of the letter is here.
-- “Editor and Publisher” featured the
issue in October 2021.
-- My bio: I have been a reporter mostly covering federal health
agencies for over 40 years, including 14 years as editor of The Nation’s Health
at the American Public Health Association. I have served as a point person on
the issue of gag rules for over eight years. I was honored to receive the 2021
Wells Key, the highest honor for a member of the Society of Professional
Journalists, specifically for this work.
