http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-fda-manipulates-the-media/
How the FDA Manipulates the Media
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been arm-twisting journalists
into relinquishing their reportorial independence, our investigation
reveals. Other institutions are following suit
By Charles Seife | Scientific American October 2016 Issue
It was a faustian bargain—and it certainly made editors at National
Public Radio squirm.
The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets,
would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the
scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA
would dictate whom NPR's reporter could and couldn't interview.
“My editors are uncomfortable with the condition that we cannot seek
reaction,” NPR reporter Rob Stein wrote back to the government officials
offering the deal. Stein asked for a little bit of leeway to do some
independent reporting but was turned down flat. Take the deal or leave it.
NPR took the deal. “I'll be at the briefing,” Stein wrote.
Later that day in April 2014, Stein—along with reporters from more than
a dozen other top-tier media organizations, including CBS, NBC, CNN, the
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—showed
up at a federal building to get his reward. Every single journalist
present had agreed not to ask any questions of sources not approved by
the government until given the go-ahead.
“I think embargoes that attempt to control sourcing are dangerous
because they limit the role of the reporter whose job it is to do a full
look at a subject,” says New York Times former public editor Margaret
Sullivan. “It's really inappropriate for a source to be telling a
journalist whom he or she can and can't talk to.” Ivan Oransky,
distinguished writer in residence at New York University's Journalism
Institute and founder of the Embargo Watch weblog, agrees: “I think it's
deeply wrong.”
This kind of deal offered by the FDA—known as a close-hold embargo—is an
increasingly important tool used by scientific and government agencies
to control the behavior of the science press. Or so it seems. It is
impossible to tell for sure because it is happening almost entirely
behind the scenes. We only know about the FDA deal because of a wayward
sentence inserted by an editor at the New York Times. But for that
breach of secrecy, nobody outside the small clique of government
officials and trusted reporters would have known that the journalists
covering the agency had given up their right to do independent reporting.
Documents obtained by Scientific American through Freedom of Information
Act requests now paint a disturbing picture of the tactics that are used
to control the science press. For example, the FDA assures the public
that it is committed to transparency, but the documents show that,
privately, the agency denies many reporters access—including ones from
major outlets such as Fox News—and even deceives them with half-truths
to handicap them in their pursuit of a story. At the same time, the FDA
cultivates a coterie of journalists whom it keeps in line with threats.
And the agency has made it a practice to demand total control over whom
reporters can and can't talk to until after the news has broken, deaf to
protests by journalistic associations and media ethicists and in
violation of its own written policies.
By using close-hold embargoes and other methods, the FDA, like other
sources of scientific information, are gaining control of journalists
who are supposed to keep an eye on those institutions. The watchdogs are
being turned into lapdogs. “Journalists have ceded the power to the
scientific establishment,” says Vincent Kiernan, a science journalist
and dean at George Mason University. “I think it's interesting and
somewhat inexplicable, knowing journalists in general as being people
who don't like ceding power.”
The press corps is primed for manipulation by a convention that goes
back decades: the embargo. The embargo is a back-room deal between
journalists and the people they cover—their sources. A source grants the
journalist access on condition that he or she cannot publish before an
agreed-on date and time.
A surprisingly large proportion of science and health stories are the
product of embargoes. Most of the major science journals offer reporters
advance copies of upcoming articles—and the contact information of the
authors—in return for agreeing not to run with the story until the
embargo expires. These embargoes set the weekly rhythm of science
coverage: On Monday afternoon, you may see a bunch of stories about the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA published almost
simultaneously. Tuesday, it's the Journal of the American Medical
Association. On Wednesday, it's Nature and the New England Journal of
Medicine. Science stories appear on Thursday. Other institutions have
also adopted the embargo system. Federal institutions, especially the
ones science and health journalists report on, have as well. Embargoes
are the reason that stories about the National Laboratories, the
National Institutes of Health and other organizations often tend to
break at the precisely same time.
Embargoes were first embraced by science reporters in the 1920s, in part
because they take the pressure off. After all, when everybody agrees to
publish their stories simultaneously, a reporter can spend extra time
researching and writing a story without fear of being scooped.
“[Embargoes] were created at the behest of journalists,” says Kiernan,
who has written a book, Embargoed Science, about scientific embargoes.
“Scientists had to be convinced to go along.” But scientific
institutions soon realized that embargoes could be used to manipulate
the timing and, to a lesser extent, the nature of press coverage. The
result is a system whereby scientific institutions increasingly control
the press corps. “They've gotten the upper hand in this relationship,
and journalists have never taken it back,” Kiernan says.
The embargo system is such an established institution in science
journalism that few reporters complain or even think about its darker
implications, at least until they themselves feel slighted. This January
the California Institute of Technology was sitting on a great story:
researchers there had evidence of a new giant planet—Planet Nine—in the
outer reaches of our solar system. The Caltech press office decided to
give only a dozen reporters, including Scientific American's Michael
Lemonick, early access to the scientists and their study. When the news
broke, the rest of the scientific journalism community was left
scrambling. “Apart from the chosen 12, those working to news deadlines
were denied the opportunity to speak to the researchers, obtain
independent viewpoints or have time to properly digest the published
research paper,” complained BBC reporter Pallab Ghosh about Caltech's
“inappropriate” favoritism in an open letter to the World Federation of
Science Journalists.
When asked about why Caltech chose to release the news only to a select
group of reporters, Farnaz Khadem, Caltech's head of communications,
stated that she is committed to being “fair and transparent” about how
and when Caltech shares news with journalists. She then refused to talk
about the Planet Nine incident or embargoes or press strategy, and she
would not grant access to anyone at Caltech who might talk about such
matters. As a consequence, it is hard to know for certain why Caltech
decided to share the news with only a select group of reporters. But it
is not hard to guess why journalists such as Ghosh were excluded. “It
wasn't that they were not good enough or not liked enough,” Kiernan
speculates. “There was a real effort here to control things, making sure
that the elite of the elite covered this story and covered it in a
certain way, which would then shape the coverage of all other
journalists. It's very clearly a control effort.”
Caltech is not the only institution that steers coverage by briefing a
very small subset of reporters. (As I was writing this piece, I received
a note from a U.S. Air Force press officer offering a sneak preview of
video footage being offered to “a select number of digital
publications.”) For years the FDA has been cultivating a small group of
journalists who are entrusted with advance notice of certain events
while others are left out in the cold. But it was not the game of
favorites that ignited a minor firestorm in the journalism community in
January 2011—it was the introduction of the close-hold embargo.
Like a regular embargo, a close-hold embargo allows early access to
information provided that attendees not publish before a set date and
time. In this case, it was a sneak peek at rules about to be published
regarding medical devices. But there was an additional condition:
reporters were expressly forbidden from seeking outside comment.
Journalists would have to give up any semblance of being able to do
independent reporting on the matter before the embargo expired.
Even reporters who had been dealing with the FDA for years were
incredulous. When one asked the agency's press office if it really was
forbidding communications with outside sources, Karen Riley, an official
at the FDA, erased all doubt. “It goes without saying that the embargo
means YOU CANNOT call around and get comment ahead of the 1 P.M.
embargo,” she said in an e-mail.
“Actually it does need some saying, since this is a new version of a
journalistic embargo,” wrote Oransky in his Embargo Watch blog. Without
the ability to contact independent sources, he continued, “journalists
become stenographers.” Kiernan echoes the sentiment: “[When] you can't
verify the information, you can't get comment on the information. You
have to just keep it among this group of people that I told you about,
and you can't use it elsewhere. In that situation, the journalist is
allowing his or her reporting hands to be tied in a way that they're not
going to be anything, ultimately, other than a stenographer.”
The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ), of which I am a
member, publicly objected to the close-hold embargo, noting that it
“will be a serious obstacle to good journalism. Reporters who want to be
competitive on a story will essentially have to agree to write only what
the FDA wants to tell the world, without analysis or outside
commentary.” Faced by this opposition, the agency quickly backtracked.
After a meeting with AHCJ leaders, Meghan Scott, then the agency's
acting associate commissioner for external affairs, wrote: “Prior to
your inquiry, the FDA did not have a formal news embargo policy in
place.” The FDA was now establishing new ground rules that “will better
serve the media and the public.”
Initially published online in June 2011, the FDA's new media policy
officially killed the close-hold embargo: “A journalist may share
embargoed material provided by the FDA with nonjournalists or third
parties to obtain quotes or opinions prior to an embargo lift provided
that the reporter secures agreement from the third party to uphold the
embargo.” Due diligence would always be allowed, at least at the FDA.
Health and science journalists breathed a sigh of relief. The AHCJ
expressed gratitude that the FDA had changed its tune, and Oransky's
Embargo Watch congratulated the agency for backing down: “For doing the
right thing, the FDA has earned a spot on the Embargo Watch Honor Roll.
Kudos.” And the FDA had cleared up the misunderstanding and affirmed
that it was committed to “a culture of openness in its interaction with
the news media and the public.”
In reality, there was no misunderstanding. The close-hold embargo had
become part of the agency's media strategy. It was here to stay—policy
or no policy.
It is hard to tell when a close-hold embargo is afoot because, by its
very nature, it is a secret that neither the reporters who have been
given special access nor the scientific institution that sets up the
deal wants to be revealed. The public hears about it only when a
journalist chooses to reveal the information.
We have a few rare instances where journalists revealed that close-hold
embargoes were being used by scientists and scientific institutions
after 2011. In 2012 biologist Gilles-Eric Séralini and his colleagues
published a dubious—later retracted and then republished—paper
purportedly linking genetically modified foods to cancer in rats. They
gave reporters early access under a close-hold embargo, quite likely to
hamstring the reporters' ability to explore gaping holes in the article,
a situation science journalist Carl Zimmer described as “a rancid,
corrupt way to report about science.” In 2014 the U.S. Chemical Safety
and Hazard Investigation Board (also called the CSB) released a report
to journalists under a close-hold embargo. When challenged, the then
managing director of the CSB, Daniel Horowitz, told Oransky's Embargo
Watch that the close-hold embargo was used “on the theory that this
would provide a more orderly process.” He then stated that the board was
going to “drop the policy in its entirety for future reports.”
Privately, however, a CSB public affairs specialist noted in an e-mail,
“Frankly, I wish we did have more stenographers out there. Government
agencies trying to control the information flow is an old story, but the
other side of the story is that government agencies that do good work
often have a difficult time getting their story told in an era of
journalistic skepticism and partisan bickering and bureaucratic infighting.”
Also in 2014 the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) used
a close-hold embargo when it announced to a dozen reporters that
researchers had discovered subtle signals of gravitational waves from
the early universe. “You could only talk to other scientists who had
seen the papers already; we didn't want them shared unduly,” says
Christine Pulliam, the media relations manager for CfA. Unfortunately,
the list of approved scientists provided by CfA listed only
theoreticians, not experimentalists—and only an experimentalist was
likely to see the flaw that doomed the study. (The team was seeing the
signature of cosmic dust, not gravitational waves.) “I felt like a fool,
in retrospect,” says Lemonick, who, as one of a dozen or so chosen
journalists, covered the story for Time (at the time, he was not on the
staff of Scientific American).
The FDA, too, quietly held close-hold embargoed briefings, even though
its official media policy forbids it. Without a source willing to talk,
it is impossible to tell for sure when or why FDA started violating its
own rules. A document from January 2014, however, describes the FDA's
strategy for getting media coverage of the launch of a new public health
ad campaign. It lays out a plan for the agency to host a “media briefing
for select, top-tier reporters who will have a major influence on
coverage and public opinion of the campaigns.… Media who attend the
briefing will be instructed that there is a strict, close-hold embargo
that does not allow for contact with those outside of the FDA for
comment on the campaign.”
Why? The document gives a glimpse: “Media coverage of the campaign is
guaranteed; however, we want to ensure outlets provide quality coverage
of the launch,” the document explains. “The media briefing will give us
an opportunity to shape the news stories, conduct embargoed interviews
with the major outlets ahead of the launch and give media outlets
opportunities to prepare more in-depth coverage of the campaign launch.”
Ten reporters—from the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today,
the Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, NBC, CNN and NPR—were invited to
have their stories shaped. The day after the briefing, on February 4,
everybody—except for the New York Times—ran with stories about the ad
campaign. Independent comment was notably missing. Only NPR, which went
live hours after the others, and CNN, in an update to its story midday,
managed to get any reaction from anyone outside of the FDA. CBS plunked
down an out-of-context quotation from the director of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, probably in hopes that readers wouldn't
notice that it was two months old. Nobody else seems to have tried to
get anyone who could critique the ad campaign.
The result was a set of stories almost uniformly cleaving to the FDA's
party line, without a hint of a question about whether the ad campaign
would be as ineffective as many other such campaigns. Not one of the
media outlets said anything about the close-hold embargo. From the
agency's point of view, it was mission accomplished.
The FDA had a much harder task two months later. The agency was about to
make public controversial new rules about electronic cigarettes. It was
nearly impossible to keep the story from leaking out ahead of time; days
before the new rules were going to be published in April 2014, rumors
were flying. Reporters around the country could smell the story and
began to e-mail the FDA's press office with questions about the
e-cigarette rules. The agency flacks would have to use all the powers at
their disposal to control the flow of information.
“I've heard a number of rumors that the FDA will be releasing its
proposed e-cigarette regulations on Monday,” Clara Ritger, then a
reporter with the National Journal asked on Friday, April 18. “I wanted
to see if I could confirm that? If that's not accurate, do you have a
timeline?” Stephanie Yao, then an FDA press officer, dodged the
question: “The proposal is still in draft form and under review. As a
matter of policy, the FDA does not share draft rules with outside groups
while a rule is still under review.”
The fencing match was on. “Thank you for following up with the
statement,” Ritger responded. “While I know the proposal is still in
draft form and under review, for my planning purposes I wanted to find
out when the proposed regulations will be coming out?”
“Have you subscribed to FDA press announcements?” Jenny Haliski, then
another FDA press officer, wrote back on Monday. “The proposed rule
itself will be published in the Federal Register.”
“Thanks for sending! I signed up,” Ritger responded. “The only other
question I had was when the proposed regulations would come out, off the
record, for planning purposes?”
Not even an offer of being off the record could get the agency to spill
the beans. “The FDA can't speculate on the timing of the proposed rule,”
Haliski replied.
But this was a carefully crafted half-truth. There was no need to
speculate. Haliski and others in the press office knew quite well not
just that the rule was going to be published on Thursday, April 24, but
also that there was going to be a close-hold embargoed briefing on
Wednesday. It's just that Ritger and the National Journal weren't invited.
The invite list had been drafted days earlier, and, as usual, the
briefing was limited to trusted journalists: the same outlets from the
ad campaign briefing in February, with the addition of a few more, which
included the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles
Times, Bloomberg News, Politico and the Congressional Quarterly. At the
very same moment that the agency was discussing the embargoed briefing
with some of their chosen reporters, anyone outside that small circle,
like Ritger, was being thrown off the trail. Not even Fox News was
allowed in.
Some within the FDA press office wondered why Fox was excluded, unlike
the other major networks. “BTW, we noticed that Fox still wasn't on the
invite list,” Raquel Ortiz, then an FDA press officer, told Haliski.
“I have no national Fox reporter who had contacted me on this topic,”
Haliski responded. “All reporters invited to the briefing needed to have
covered tobacco regulatory issues before.”
Ortiz realized that this wasn't an honest answer: “But they definitely
cover FDA/CTP [Center for Tobacco Products] and tobacco stories—[a
colleague has] seen them.”
“We don't have a good contact for Fox,” Haliski insisted, rather lamely.
A contact would not have been hard to find had they bothered to look.
And, as chance would have it, the contact found them. Early the next
morning, with plenty of time before the briefing, Fox's senior national
correspondent—John Roberts, one-time heir apparent to Dan
Rather—contacted Haliski asking for access. “I'm aware that the FDA will
likely come out with its deeming rule regarding e-cigarettes in the next
week or so. I'd like to have a story ready to go for the day (holding to
any embargo),” he wrote. “Can we make that happen?”
“Hi, John, Have you subscribed to FDA press announcements?” Access denied.
“I was particularly troubled by it because I was the medical
correspondent for CBS Evening News for a couple of years, and I had a
very good relationship with the FDA and everybody there,” says Roberts,
who found out he was excluded after the other correspondents' stories
came out. “I was told by these folks that Fox news wasn't invited
because of ‘past experiences with Fox.’”
A little after noon on Wednesday, April 23, the briefing went on as
scheduled. All the reporters present understood the terms, as announced:
“As discussed, under this embargo you will not be able to reach out to
third parties for comment on this announcement. We are providing you
with a preview of the information with this understanding.” But by 2:30
P.M., the close-hold embargo was already fraying at the edges. FDA
officials apparently got wind that a reporter was trying to talk to a
member of Congress about the new rules. Even though it was not clear
that this was a breach of the embargo—the interview was scheduled for
after the embargo expired, and the reporter presumably did not share any
crucial information ahead of time—it was bending the close-hold rules,
and the FDA was livid. Within half an hour, FDA's Jefferson had fired
off an angry e-mail to the close-hold journalists.
“It has been brought to our attention that there has already been a
break in the embargo…. Third-party outreach of any kind was and is not
permitted for this announcement. Everyone who participated agreed to
this,” she wrote. “Moving forward, we will no longer consider embargoed
briefings for news media if reporters are not willing to abide by the
terms an embargo…. We take this matter very seriously, and as a
consequence any individuals who violated the embargo will be excluded
from future embargoed briefings with the agency.” Violate the rules,
even in spirit, and you'll be left out in the cold with the rest.
The denials flew in. “This is very frustrating as someone who has
consistently played by the rules and has covered CTP/FDA for years to be
lumped in with a group of reporters that cannot respect your requests
not to reach out to third parties,” insisted then AP reporter Michael
Felberbaum. “I have of course always advocated that you work more
closely with reporters like myself who clearly understand and cover this
area consistently instead of reporters who are just assigned to handle
on a whim.”
But despite the scare about a breach, the secrecy held. When the embargo
expired and the early news stories went online, the FDA had little to
complain about; the embargo had worked once again to shape coverage.
Felberbaum's piece, for example, quoted Margaret Hamburg, then head of
the FDA, and Mitch Zeller, the head of the agency's CTP, but nobody
else. Even after he updated his piece later in the day to get some
outside comments, there was little hint of how controversial the new
rules were. Members of the tobacco industry were generally unhappy with
increased federal regulation of their business, while antitobacco
advocates tended to argue that the new regulations were far too weak and
took way too long to promulgate. And there was no mention, in
Felberbaum's article, at least, that the agency had tried to regulate
e-cigarettes several years earlier but was slapped down with a stinging
rebuke from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. (When
asked about his work for the AP, Felberbaum—who has since quit his job
as a reporter to become an FDA press officer—said, “I'm not really sure
whether I'm comfortable discussing that at this point.”)
Some of the other outlets, like NPR, injected a little more nuance into
their pieces, despite the restrictions, by doing additional reporting
after the embargo expired. (In a statement, NPR said that agreeing to
the FDA's conditions was not a violation of ethics guidelines and “in no
way influenced which other voices or ideas were included in the
coverage.”) Still, even those pieces did not stray far from the key
messages that the agency wanted to get across. Again the FDA found
little to complain about. Except for one little thing.
Of all the media outlets, the New York Times was the only one to mention
the close-hold embargo: “FDA officials gave journalists an outline of
the new rules on Wednesday but required that they not talk to industry
or public health groups until after Thursday's formal release of the
document.” (“I felt like I wanted to be clear with readers,” Sabrina
Tavernise, the author of the story, later told Sullivan, the New York
Times' public editor at the time. “Usually you would have reaction in a
story like this, but in this case, there wasn't going to be any.”)
The FDA was not pleased that the omertà had been broken. “I have to say
while I generally reserve my editorial comments, I was a little
surprised by the tone of your article and the swipe you took at the
embargo in the paper—when after combing through the coverage no one else
felt the need to do so in quite that way,” the FDA's Jefferson upbraided
Tavernise in an e-mail. “To be clear, this is me taking stuff personally
when I know I shouldn't, but I thought we had a better working
relationship than this…. I never expect totally positive coverage as our
policies are controversial and complex, but at least more neutral and
slightly less editorialized. Simply put, bummer. Off to deal with a
pissed Fox News reporter.”
Tavernise promptly apologized. “Geez, sorry about the embargo thing.
Editors were asking why we didn't get to see it so I was asked to put a
line in to explain,” she wrote. (Tavernise declined to comment for this
article; Celia Dugger, one of the New York Times editors who handled the
piece, said via e-mail: “As to the decision to describe the conditions
of the embargo in the story, Sabrina and I talked it over and agreed it
was best to include them.”)
The FDA was not pleased that the secret of the close-hold embargo was
out, and the excluded press was confused and angry. “In this particular
instance, it struck me as very strange,” says Fox's Roberts. “It was a
government agency picking and choosing who it was going to talk to on a
matter of public policy, and then the fact that I had a longstanding
relationship with the FDA that, with this new administration, didn't
seem to matter.”
Oransky complained again on Embargo Watch about the FDA's attempts to
turn journalists “into stenographers.” Sullivan asked a few pointed
questions of Jefferson, who, in Sullivan's words, insisted that the
FDA's intent was “not to be manipulative but to give reporters early
access to a complicated news development” and noted, in passing, that
Tavernise had not objected to the terms of the close-hold embargo. But
the damage was short-lived. Very little came of the complaints; Sullivan
said that she would “like to see the Times push back—hard—against such
restrictions in every instance and be prepared to walk away from the
story if need be,” but there is no evidence of any substantial pushback
by anyone.
The two-tiered system of outsiders and insiders that undergirds the
close-hold policy is also still enforced. Major press outlets such as
Scientific American and Agence France-Presse have written to the FDA to
complain about being excluded but have not received any satisfaction
from the agency. Months after the e-cigarette affair and following a
different FDA story about food labeling that insiders had early access
to, Time magazine complained about its lack of access to a
select-press-only phone call. “Time was not included … (they weren't
even on my radar to be honest with you), but we handled all their
queries” the day after the call, then FDA press officer Jennifer Corbett
Dooren wrote.
Absent any indications from the agency, it is anyone's guess whether the
close-hold embargo is still in use at the FDA and, if so, how
frequently. Unfortunately, the FDA refused to answer any questions.
Because I am suing the agency for access to documents about embargo
practices at the FDA, the press office, in a statement that failed to
answer any specific questions, said that news embargoes “allow reporters
time to develop their articles on complex matters in an informed,
accurate way” and that its use of embargoes conforms to relevant
government guidelines and best practices. The press office referred all
questions to the FDA's Office of the Chief Counsel, which did not supply
answers.
Since the New York Times slip, no journalist covering the agency has
openly mentioned being subject to such restrictions. Scientific American
made a significant effort to contact many of the reporters believed to
have agreed to an FDA close-hold embargo—including the AP's Felberbaum,
the Times' Tavernise, NPR's Stein, and other reporters from Reuters, USA
Today and the LA Times. None could shed any light on the issue. Some
explicitly refused to speak to Scientific American; some failed to
return queries; two had no recollection of having ever agreed to a
close-hold embargo, including Tom Burton, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall
Street Journal reporter and the only one willing to answer questions. “I
didn't remember it at all, and [even] after you told me, I didn't
remember,” he said. As far as he knows, Burton added, such embargoes are
rare.
No matter how rare it might be, there is documentary evidence of its
happening multiple times, and each instance since 2011 is a violation of
the FDA's official media policy, which explicitly bans close-hold
embargoes. This policy still stands, just as it did before the last
close-hold embargo. The smart money says that the agency's unofficial
policy still stands, too—and the favoritism and close-hold embargoes
continue. It is apparently too sweet an arrangement for the FDA simply
to walk away.
Despite the difficulty of measuring the use of close-hold embargoes,
Oransky and Kiernan and other embargo observers agree that they—and
other variations of the embargo used to tighten control over the
press—appear to be on the rise. And they have been cropping up in other
fields of journalism, such as business journalism as well. “More and
more sources, including government sources but also corporate sources,
are interested in controlling the message, and this is one of the ways
they're trying to do it,” says the New York Times' Sullivan. “I think it
should be resisted.”
As much blame as government and other institutions bear for attempting
to control the press through such means, the primary responsibility lies
with the journalists themselves. Even a close-hold embargo wouldn't
constrain a reporter without the reporter's consent; the reporter can
simply wait until the embargo expires and speak to outside sources,
albeit at the cost of filing the story a little bit later.
Says Oransky: “We as journalists need to look inward a little bit and
think about why all of us feel we absolutely have to publish something
at embargo [expiration] when we don't think we have the whole story?”
Alas, Kiernan says, there isn't any movement within the journalism
community to change things: “I don't know that journalists in general
have taken a step back, [looking] from the 50,000-foot view to
understand how their work is controlled and shaped by the embargo system.
_______________________________________________
Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list
Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org
http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel