Critics condemn restrictions forced on science media
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8192
In the October Scientific American, science journalist Charles Seife indicts the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other organizations for imposing secrecy-based “close-hold embargoes” to control reporters and the news. Others in the media hear his alarm about the practice, which he likens to omertà, the Mafia’s code of silence.
In an opinion piece inspired by Seife and distributed from Bloomberg View, columnist Megan McArdle crisply summarized the FDA’s media-control innovation, which she calls “scurrilous":
Sometimes a source gives information to journalists before a public announcement in exchange for an agreement that the journalist won’t publish the information until an agreed-upon time. This process—called an embargo—is actually reasonable and beneficial to the public, because it gives reporters time to dig into a technical subject without feeling that they have to only skim the paper quickly and dash off an article so they can be the first to publish and get the scoop.
The FDA’s “close hold” embargo is an innovation I’d never heard of, however: It forbids reporters to talk to any third parties until the embargo date and time. To a reporter, this is outrageous: Sources can control what they tell us, but they normally aren’t allowed to control who else we talk to.
McArdle stipulates, as do others, that information from the FDA can “dramatically move markets.” But she worries “that once officials start granting this sort of special access, it’s very easy for the agency to use it, not to protect markets from leaks, but to protect the agency from stories it doesn’t like.”
FDA-related news stories regularly entangle science with politics, as illustrated in headlines on recent Wall Street Journal editorials:
- “A drug cartel at the FDA : A new rule will produce a lawsuit rush and raise prices for generics.”
- “The terminally ill deserve right-to-try laws : The FDA’s approach to drug approval means that patients die waiting for possibly lifesaving drugs.”
- “The boys who beat the FDA : The agency approves a drug after an ugly bureaucratic brawl.”
Seife’s long piece, reprinted at Salon, carries a subhead charging that the FDA “has been arm-twisting journalists into relinquishing their reportorial independence” and that other institutions—including physics institutions—have been “following suit.”
One such institution is the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Seife reports that it “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.” He continues:
“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.)
Seife declares that the “press corps is primed for manipulation by a convention that goes back decades,” the traditional embargo. Along that line, he offers another example from astrophysics, intended to show that even that practice can have “darker implications":
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 ... 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.
Seife quotes Vincent Kiernan, author of Embargoed Science , about Caltech’s motives: “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.”
As a professor of journalism at New York University, Seife preaches what he practices. He has gone after the FDA before. In 2015 at Slate, he published “Are Your Medications Safe? The FDA buries evidence of fraud in medical trials. My students and I dug it up.”
He’s suing the FDA in connection with the close-hold embargo practice. His complex legal filing charges that the agency is “unlawfully withholding” certain information. The filing levels this accusation:
The FDA has on multiple occasions—and in violation of the agency’s stated policy—offered advance information to journalists on the condition that journalists not discuss the matter with third parties before the expiration of the embargo. This practice is considered unethical by many journalism experts.
Yet journalists themselves succumb. Seife’s article tells the story of an April 2014 day when reporters from National Public Radio (NPR), CBS, NBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times “agreed not to ask any questions of sources not approved by the government until given the go-ahead.” (NPR’s ombudsman recently emphasized , at some length, that NPR rarely accepts close-hold embargoes.) Seife calls the FDA “deaf to protests by journalistic associations and media ethicists.” And he explains the depth of secrecy involved in close-hold omertà:
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.
Like Megan McArdle, other observers and practitioners of journalism—and science journalism—are expressing support for Seife.
The Cato Institute, which professes dedication “to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace,” posted a short commentary recommending his piece.
At Reason.com—published under the motto “Free minds and free markets"—managing editor Peter Suderman commented similarly. Suderman has published in more than a dozen national publications, many of them conservative-leaning. He ended with an overall judgment conveyed sarcastically:
This whole thing is appalling, especially given that it’s an arm of the federal government using it to prevent the public from seeing outside opinions on its decisions.
Unfortunately, the strategy seems to work much of the time, as the story notes that reporters from major news outlets, including all the broadcast TV networks, CNN, and the Associated Press, have participated in such embargoes, and published stories without any critical comment.
At that point, why not just become an FDA press officer? In fact, as the story notes, one former reporter for the AP did just that. When Scientific American asked for comment on the his work as a reporter, he responded: “I’m not really sure whether I’m comfortable discussing that at this point.”
Business Insider highlighted the secrecy criticism in its headline: “A top journalist is suing the US FDA over its use of a banned and secretive practice to manipulate the news.” Science Alert reprinted the piece.
Ivan Oransky —medical doctor, journalist, blogger, professor, Retraction Watch cofounder—finds time to offer the blog Embargo Watch. In 2011, the headline on one of his postings asked, “FDA wants stenographers? Agency says reporters can’t interview anyone before its embargo lifts.” His headline on a 22 September 2016 posting charged, “The FDA has been using embargoes to manipulate journalists.”
In 2014, Margaret Sullivan, then the New York Times‘s public editor responsible for critiquiing journalistic practice, scrutinized this sentence from a Times news article: “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 documents.” Under close-hold omertà, the FDA had tried to require that no such sentence appear. Sullivan condemned the close-hold embargo as “a concept that gives many journalists the creeps: the government telling journalists to whom they can and can’t talk.” At the end, she declared that the “practice ought to be stomped out” and that the Times should “push back—hard—against such restrictions in every instance, and be prepared to walk away from the story if need be.”
Seife invokes Sullivan’s views prominently in both his article and his legal filing, but also reports that “there is no evidence of any substantial pushback by anyone.”
So what’s the outlook for close-hold omertà? Seife says:
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.
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.
On the rise? McArdle calls that a “creeping political bias.” Her concluding paragraphs merit borrowing:
A creeping political bias is exactly what we should expect: When agencies and government officials can control the flow of information to get more favorable stories and punish reporters who displease them, they will.
It’s the responsibility of voters and citizens to demand better: The FDA should use embargoes responsibly or not at all, returning to the old practice of releasing the information to everyone at once.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.