Reporting on the government institution charged with saving us from the Covid pandemic was restricted enough to leave real holes in what we knew.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—like many other organizations these days, public and private—prohibits its employees from speaking freely to reporters. At many entities, the rules mean staff members cannot have any unauthorized contact with reporters, with media inquiries often redirected to a public information office (PIO).
The forced notification of the higher-ups is quite enough to silence many employees about anything that would displease the bosses. But beyond that, reporters’ requests to speak to someone are often not granted at all.
Unreported gaps in defenses
Why are those controls not an outrage? Certainly, some CDC shortcomings that led to ill-controlled Covid spread could have been revealed earlier—maybe well before the pandemic—if people were talking to reporters normally. That would include confidential conversations, if that were the agreement between staff member and reporter.
The Covid Crisis Group, in its investigative report last year, pointed out (among many other shortcomings) that neither the CDC nor anyone in government had a well-developed design for screening people at international air gateways. Nor had CDC or any other agency “tried to build a rapid-action, interdisciplinary, systematic biomedical surveillance network.” In July 2020, months after the agency’s mistakes with the Covid test hampered the early response, the Washington Post (7/4/20) revealed CDC had made the same mistakes with the Zika virus test four years before.
One could look at each such gap in the nation’s pandemic defenses and think: “There were agency staff who understood the problem—possibly couldn’t sleep at night because of it—and they were banned from speaking freely about it to reporters.”
Quite possibly either a general-interest outlet or a specialized trade newsletter would have been tipped off, if they had normal contact with such people.
Gradually, over several decades, with almost no public discussion, these gag rules have come to many corners of society, including public and private entities, businesses, federal, state and local governments, organizations covered by science reporters, schools of all levels, and police departments. The censorship mechanism is taught in at least some communications classes.
Journalists’ responsibility to fight such restrictions, not just get stories, is indicated by regular reports about bad situations that might have been changed earlier: information on generic drug production problems that took author Katherine Eban 10 years to pull out of the system; plans by the Trump administration to separate children from parents; young CDC scientists who knew in early 2020 that Covid could be spread by people who did not seem ill; or the many law enforcement organizations all over the country that stifle reporting on themselves.
Blockages politically driven
Former CDC media relations head Glen Nowak (Quill, 9/22/22) has said the agency’s controls grew tighter with each presidential administration, beginning with President Ronald Reagan. Each new administration looked back at what the previous one had done, and saw there had been no adverse political impact from tightening the restrictions. Nowak said the blockages were often politically driven, and frequently effective in controlling information.
When a reporter contacts the PIO for permission to talk to someone at the CDC, the request is sent up through the political layers of government, at least to the Department of Health and Human Services secretary of public affairs, and often all the way to the White House. Behind closed doors, officials decide who may speak to whom, and what may be discussed.
Nowak said:
Administrations, typically, their priority is trying to remain elected. And they’re often looking at policies through: how will this help or not help when it comes to running for election…. A serious health threat can be underplayed or ignored if it doesn’t align with political ideology of the party in power, or a party is trying to get power.
For over 15 years, a number of journalism organizations have been fighting these controls. Letters signed by 25 to 60 organizations have gone to the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, as well as to Congress, calling for an end to the constraints in federal entities.
News outlets have researched or editorialized against the practice. Last year, the Lexington Courier Journal (6/15/23) found that of 35 Kentucky agencies, 70% restrict or prohibit employees from talking to journalists. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette editorial board (9/4/23) said that “governments and other agencies have tightly constricted access to the people who actually make the decisions and know, first-hand, key information.”
Testing the restrictions
There’s been another important step in the last few months. Two journalists filed separate suits against public agencies for having these policies. Some people, including attorneys, have said in the past that journalists could not sue agencies in such instances. A plaintiff, they said, would have to be an insider, a “willing speaker.”
However, Brittany Hailer, director of the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, sued the Allegheny County Jail last August for allegedly prohibiting employees and contractors from speaking to journalists without prior approval of the warden. Her complaint says that the jail, which houses on average 1,553 people, has had a death rate “reportedly nearly twice the national average among local jails of similar size.”
Hailer is represented by the Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
In addition, the publishers of the Catskills, NY–based Reporter sued the Delaware County (New York) Board of Supervisors. The board had pulled the county’s legal advertising from the paper, allegedly in retaliation for news coverage the board didn’t like, and then prohibited county employees from speaking to the paper about “pressing matters of public concern.” The board mandated, the complaint said, that all communications with the Reporter be funneled through the county attorney’s office.
The Reporter’s publishers are represented by the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic and Michael J. Grygiel.
Both cases are currently pending before the courts.
Foundational thinking for the cases was provided by a 2019 report by prominent First Amendment attorney Frank LoMonte, who was then head of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, and is now counsel at CNN. In a summary report, LoMonte said of the constraints:
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. The only question is whether the restraint will be treated as a presumptively unconstitutional prior restraint, or whether a less rigorous level of scrutiny will apply.
Is this authoritarianism?
Is this trend a kind of authoritarianism that is growing out of our public relations culture?
Many types of media—national, local or specialized—publish, with little or no skepticism, information handed out from government agencies. Nor do journalists warn audiences that the staff members who know other parts of the story are walled off from reporters.
Why does the press assume that any human organization will maintain competence or integrity when it is blocking or manipulating information about itself?
Even as climate disruption poses an ever-greater threat, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy have these don’t-talk policies, as do most federal agencies.
Last year, the Department of Commerce, with its prominent role in regulating artificial intelligence, put out a policy saying that requests for official press interviews should go through the public affairs officials, and further
should be submitted by email with details to include story angle, background, requested attribution, Q&A, suggested talking points and reporter’s deadline. Please do not agree to attribution terms prior to OPA [Office of Public Affairs] clearance. If possible, please allow a 24-hour turnaround for print interviews. Please allow a 48-hour turnaround for television interviews, due to the extended White House clearance process.
But, again, even with the hazards inherent in such restraints on journalism, the press doesn’t often tell the public about the controls.
At the local level, stories emerge about abuses by law enforcement, like the murder of George Floyd and systemic abuse by sheriffs’ departments. Still, most of the press doesn’t explain that many police departments impose rules that can hide such violations.
The gag rules, or “censorship by PIO,” have become a cultural norm, and millions of people in the United States are now banned from speaking, or speaking freely, to journalists. Even though free speech is necessary for democracy and public welfare, journalists have in large part acquiesced to making routine, permission-to-speak requests through PIOs or others.
A right to control the message?
I’ve heard reporters from prominent outlets gripe about the process, and the time it takes to be allowed to talk to someone. But there seems to be no recognition that the public needs to know when none of the thousands of people in an agency are allowed to speak to journalists without that oversight, and most can’t speak to them at all. Nor is there discussion that someone in the agency, in a high or low position, could blow the journalists’ story out of the water, even after publication, or blow their minds about something they are oblivious to.
This may have originated with the long-held journalism convention that news outlets do not complain to the public about the trials they go through when people in power try to block their newsgathering. We may fear that if we admit we’ve been blocked, we discredit our news product.
On the other side, some public relations people or agency leaders try to rebut the idea they are censors, saying they are trying to help the press, or increase transparency, or they want to coordinate the story from different parts of their organization. That, of course, doesn’t address the fact they could serve these functions without banning all unfettered contacts.
Other PR officials are quite straightforward about why employees are silenced: People leading an organization, they say, have a right to set the message.
There is no doubt that agencies and offices have real challenges in this communications era. Carefully crafted, honest messages can be blown apart by careless statements. Employees can be ill-informed, or they can be promoting their own agenda. Statements can come across as coming from the organization itself when they are not—due to what the staffer says, what the news outlet says or how the audience interprets it. Journalists are often time-pressured, and can be sensation-seeking or less than careful.
Those are serious problems that can cause real harm. They need to be continuously addressed by both agencies and journalists, with both sides listening carefully to the other. However, they are not a reason to degrade ourselves to what is one of the most repressive and deadly things in history: people in power controlling information.
There is no reason news outlets can’t fight this. If they stand together, they can fight against these policies, and work to ensure the press and others have normal access to staff. They can work within their associations or build coalitions. They can agree to tell the public routinely when employees are gagged, treating the situation like the corruption it is.
The press has led similar fights for decades, pushing for access to documents with freedom of information laws, and access to official meetings under the open meetings laws. Fighting for normal communication with human beings should not be different.
Why is the press doing this?
Jay Rosen, journalism professor at New York University, says (Popular Resistance, 2/5/24): “The news system is not designed for human understanding. Even at the top providers, it’s designed to produce a flow of new content today—and every day.”
Media, at their best, do seriously excellent content. In this era of information tsunamis, a lot of stuff is still pushed at the press. There are also masses of information in the public arena that just take work to pull together. By reading the Federal Register or other public documents, a reporter can find something intriguing that’s getting little attention. And reporters also get material that isn’t public.
The unfortunate side of all this legitimate supply is that it keeps outlets from worrying too much about how people in power are manipulating us away from overall understanding, and from some of the most critical information.
Journalists often respond to questions about these censorship systems with something like, “Good reporters get the story anyway.” It’s possible that we can use our skills to dig out stories that audiences are interested in, and hopefully our news outlet survives. That doesn’t mean that we are doing good enough coverage of the institutions that impact the public—not with nearly everyone in the organization silenced.
The newsgathering controls began to grow well before today’s alarming decline in numbers of journalists and news outlets, or the emergence of other threats to democracy. One can imagine that vicious cycles among those factors will worsen as journalists grow even more dependent “on inexpensive official sources as the credible news source,” as press critic Victor Pickard (Editor & Publisher, 11/15/21) has called them.
It’s up to journalists to fight for the right to talk to people with vital information normally, fluidly, without authorities’ involvement.
Featured image: Creative Commons photo by Carolyn Langton.
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