Harsh questions for the press about reporting blocked access
For many years before the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists “weren’t there,” to a huge extent, in terms of reporting on the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The controls keeping them out continue.
Reporters cannot enter the facilities except under controlled circumstances like official meetings. There are no credentials to allow reporters to enter, although journalists could be vetted as easily as the thousands of employees are. The rules force reporters to go through public information offices to seek permission to speak to anyone. In reality, reporters are often never allowed to speak to the people they want at all.
Last year Donald McNeil, Jr., then a New York Times reporter, said that even under the Obama administration CDC had to clear anything important through its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. But under the Trump administration, he said, “If you don’t talk to people off the record, you don’t talk to anyone because nobody is being allowed to say anything on the record,” unless it is cleared through various layers, sometimes including the White House.
Many other reporters say the same. Why, with tens of thousands of people in these institutions silenced, do we believe we are getting even half the story? Why are we implying that the public should entrust millions of lives to agencies when it is impossible to really know them? Why do we trust authorities who use their power to control public scrutiny of themselves?
For the 25 to 30 years that these controls have surged, starting with the restrictions against employees speaking to journalists without oversight, news outlets have said little about them, certainly not explaining them in each article they impact. We cling to our traditional work ethic that says people will always try to stop us and good reporters get the story anyway.
Frequently, the reality is journalists get stuff and then deem whatever they get to be THE story. Despite journalists’ dictum that skepticism is critical to our work, we have our own conflict of interest with being too skeptical: we need to publish stories and they need to be credible. So when FDA or CDC, with all their authority, pushes out a briefing or statement or allows an interview, that is a valuable resource to us. We want to publish it, basically. We don’t want to think about the fact that all the staff around that situation is silenced, so who can know what the real story is? We certainly don’t want to explain that to our audiences.
In reality, the controls on reporters talking to people and doing newsgathering have become a pervasive norm through our culture. The Society of Professional Journalists did seven surveys (2012–2016) that show the restrictions have become common and often intense in federal, state and local governments, in education and science, and in police departments.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on March 1 that Chester County has written into its ethics code prohibitions against employees speaking about almost anything related to their job to anybody, including friends, family or press. Later coverage said the officials, after being criticized, planned to modify the policy, but still leave it restrictive.
This deep, long term trend is a recipe for corrosion, perhaps related to or underlying the general decline in democracy. Journalists are morally obligated to find ways to oppose it. The first way, of course, is to explain it to the public, just like any other corruption, and to report on it repeatedly as it continues to be a factor.
It’s also imperative that we fight these restrictions on the policy level, for the sake of protecting people. We also need to continuously tell legislators and other policymakers that the controls are making us all subordinate to insiders. There are, after all, grave consequences to the press not being allowed in the CDC, FDA or other entities that impact the public.