“a rancid, corrupt way to report about science”

September 25, 2016 11:55 AM

"Without the ability to contact independent sources, 'journalists become stenographers'". Scientific American accuses the FDA of manipulating and deceiving the press, the close-hold embargo being a major method, despite the FDA's disavowing the practice in 2011.

On the other hand,

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.”

A little more from Embargo Watch and Business Insider.

posted by doctornemo (18 comments total)

Wow has Charles Seife of Scientific American written this as if he were shocked, Shocked! to discover that there is gambling going on in this establishment. Practices like this very much can have a completely legitimate purpose, particularly for agencies like the FDA. When a regulatory body is releasing information that has both commercial and public relevance, making journalists commit to not sharing insider information in ways that will inevitably spread and give some companies unfair advantage over others makes perfect sense. He seems to be working awfully hard to connect his beef with the FDA to the bullshit that Séralini succeeded at pulling with a shocking number of supposedly reputable journalistic institutions (Previously in 2012), but at least to my eye he never gets around to making a real case that anything actually inappropriate happened.

Makes me wonder if the narrative we're being sold is the mirror opposite of what is happening, and this is an example of the media trying to inappropriately manipulate the FDA.
posted by Blasdelb at 12:41 PM on September 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

If you call a bargain Faustian your critique shouldn't focus on the devil.
posted by srboisvert at 12:47 PM on September 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

yes, but we don't normally think of the FDA as the devil.
posted by zippy at 12:52 PM on September 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

doesn't it stand for Federal Devil Administration?
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:11 PM on September 25, 2016 [7 favorites]

Practices like this very much can have a completely legitimate purpose

Excuse me? Restricting the sources reporters can go to for commentary can serve some legitimate purpose? Enlighten me please.
posted by hat_eater at 1:56 PM on September 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

Not to mention demanding that they keep the arrangement secret. This stinks.
posted by hat_eater at 1:58 PM on September 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

There are still journalists?
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 2:20 PM on September 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Restricting the sources reporters can go to for commentary can serve some legitimate purpose? Enlighten me please.

The Obama administration, and by extension federal agencies under his purview, have an agenda, and it seems strange that we have to pretend that they should act as if a large part of their job isn't to influence the public narrative about issues under their purview. The FDA wants free, uncritical coverage of their ad campaign or new regulations and I don't think there's anything wrong with that desire. Why are reporters agreeing to restrictions that harm their independence for what appears to be very little gain? Does the NYT or Washington post really need to "scoop" a new ad campaign on nutritional guidelines? Or for a new regulation like the one described in the SA editorial, the final rules on FDA regulation of eciagrettes took several years to develop but journalists can't take a few days to write more than a glorified press release handed to them by the FDA?
posted by muddgirl at 2:41 PM on September 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Excuse me? Restricting the sources reporters can go to for commentary can serve some legitimate purpose? Enlighten me please."

In each of the examples given, the reporters appear to have been handed early access to commercially valuable information before it was publicly available. Reporters talking to people who would be able to give them context for this privileged information, particularly industry groups as the New York Times editorial note specifically mentions, necessarily involves them sharing this kind of highly sensitive information with exactly the people who would be able to make inappropriate use of it. Can you imagine how much an advance copy of the new rules about e-cigarettes would have been worth to the right buyer? Given the level of scientific and regulatory illiteracy that is the new normal for science journalism, I can imagine quite a few journalists could plausibly claim naiveté while causing significant commercial damage. Having a close-hold embargo like this would allow the FDA to share sensitive information with journalists with enough time to allow them to digest the information and responsibly report on it.

This kind of practice certainly has the potential for abuse, but this dude doesn't appear to have actually found any. What was so wrong about how so many supposedly reputable outlets reported on the Séralini affair was that the twelve 'journalists' who did it were picked for their ignorance, naiveté, and biases and that they allowed themselves to be played so badly. If a journalist believes that they lack the scientific and regulatory literacy to interpret what they would be given under a close-hold embargo it should be unethical for them to accept it, and if they found themselves with questions they would need to ask before print, they could always hold the press for a few hours to do it.

"Not to mention demanding that they keep the arrangement secret. This stinks."

The whole article plays a big three card monty game around what exactly was meant to be kept secret and when, but its pretty clear that each of the journalists involved in his examples were not under the impression that they were meant to keep the nature of the arrangement confidential after the embargo was lifted. Why else would the New York Times publish that note only to be surprised at how its tone was chastised? The whole point of an embargo is for information to be kept secret until after the appointed time. I agree that this stinks, but it looks like its just an idiot reporter farting.
posted by Blasdelb at 2:51 PM on September 25, 2016 [11 favorites]

And in case it's not clear, the several-years process that it takes for a federal org to write new rules/regulations includes scads and scads of input by industry groups, lobbyists, congress, the president, and the American people. Arguing that the FDA is doing these groups a disservice by trying to streamline the PR process for the final version of these rules has to address the fact that the rule-making process is not a secret. The competing concerns have their own press releases ready to go.
posted by muddgirl at 3:39 PM on September 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Having a close-hold embargo like this would allow the FDA to share sensitive information with journalists with enough time to allow them to digest the information and responsibly report on it.

I disagree. You can't expect journalists to be knowledgeable enough on all topics to responsibly report without outside interviews. If you can't do interviews, the main effect of an embargo is that it allows a small set of journalists the ability to quickly repackage what is in the primary document, after only hearing the author's spin on it. This seems like a worse outcome for the public than no embargo period at all.
posted by demiurge at 6:49 PM on September 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

Journalists are selling out for one day extra access on complex science and policy stories? For christ's sake, just slow down, do a story a week later and school the schmoes who rushed through the thing. This doesn't seem like it should tempting if so many journalists hadn't already defined down their job to be stenographers anyway. If you need more interviews to do a good story, then take the time to get more interviews instead of rushing a bad story to print.

As a taxpayer I think I'm annoyed that the FDA does this at all, and I'm definitely annoyed by the "keep the arrangement secret." But that's a bit of a fluke--I don't help pay the salary of most people who want to spin the media and there's usually not an ethical problem trying ot get good press. But as long journalists are willing to buy this sort of crap, someone will sell it, and a lot o
posted by mark k at 11:55 PM on September 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

[Hmm, my post I tailed off there--I was going to say "a lot of them will be doing it for worse reasons that the FDA." In the scheme of things this seems some pretty minor pressure on journalists and it's disheartening to read a piece that implies they can't hope to resist.]
posted by mark k at 12:53 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

"I disagree. You can't expect journalists to be knowledgeable enough on all topics to responsibly report without outside interviews. If you can't do interviews, the main effect of an embargo is that it allows a small set of journalists the ability to quickly repackage what is in the primary document, after only hearing the author's spin on it. This seems like a worse outcome for the public than no embargo period at all."

Scientific papers are not that hard to read, and its a pretty transferable skill across disciplines. The whole format is carefully designed to force authors trying to get away with something to use enough rope to hang themselves in relatively predictable ways. It doesn't require that much fundamental knowledge to be able to judge a scientific article, and we should be able to expect journalists specializing in scientific topics to possess at least an undergraduate level understanding of science. However, articles where the journalist conspicuously has no meaningful understanding of the topic being covered are the new normal, and no amount of asking around will transmute a bullshitter into anything but a stenographer poorly transcribing multiple sources. There is no substitute for having at least a very basic understanding of the topic and exercising critical thinking skills.

My own work made the rounds of anglophone, francophone, and Dutch language press a few times and out of dozens of articles, some quite long, not a single one has yet to show any evidence of the author having even glanced at the generally open access papers. Several made low undergraduate level errors that were clearly copied from one of the more quickly published articles, and none has yet to even attempt to critically analyze my papers with any context other that what my press offices have fed them despite having interviewed a couple of other people in a few instances. I can tell you from experience that feeding your work into the clickbait mill requires a lot of active management because, for the most part, basically no science journalists will have the foggiest idea what they're writing about or will care to.

This article talks about the Federal Register like the author only just discovered that it is a thing, which is beyond pathetic for someone purporting to have something meaningful to say about the FDA, wildly misrepresents things like the timing of the underlying FDA policy so as to inaccurately suggest that the FDA was not following its own rules, fails to even mention the purpose of the thing its attacking, and fails to adequately describe its sources in such a way as that they could be easily found by a reader. While this dude clearly is not the kind of journalist who should trust himself with a close-hold embargo, surely the FDA should be able to expect the profession to be able to provide at least an elite few with an undergraduate level understanding of science and some professional experience reading scientific papers or regulatory documents?
posted by Blasdelb at 1:40 AM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

There are huge issues with government agencies giving reporters they like special access. One is tempted to cut the FDA some slack here, but certainly they could abuse such powers like other agencies routinely do. A reasonable compromise might be requiring that reporters granted early access possess at least a master's degree in a STEM field, so that as Blasdelb says they could at least try to form their own opinions.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:22 AM on September 26, 2016

While this dude clearly is not the kind of journalist who should trust himself with a close-hold embargo, surely the FDA should be able to expect the profession to be able to provide at least an elite few with an undergraduate level understanding of science and some professional experience reading scientific papers or regulatory documents?

I agree that the state of science journalism in general is extremely poor, but having the FDA pick which journalists it wants to have (temporary) exclusive access to policy documents benefits the FDA PR machine, and not the public or the interests of good policy discussions. Embargo policies like this actually encourage pre-release of the information to individuals that the PR team thinks will:

1. Mostly positive towards the document.
2. Write a wide-reaching article.
3. Not break the embargo.

What incentive does a PR team have to give pre-release access to a journalist who has been highly critical of your work?

A reasonable compromise might be requiring that reporters granted early access possess at least a master's degree in a STEM field

I don't think that a reporter with a masters degree in Electrical Engineering has more of a chance than someone with a BA in Journalism of determining methodological oversights in a Nature paper on correlation between a particular gene expression in a mouse model and breast cancer. Both individuals would have to talk to scientists who actually work in that field to seriously evaluate it.
posted by demiurge at 9:21 AM on September 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've got a chemistry BS and 25 years professional experience in pharma and I wouldn't trust myself to give a good interpretation of the impactfulness a paper unless it was in a narrow subfield that I've been following.

The paper itself can be fine but the issues are like "well, this is basically the same approach as two other labs were doing five years ago and they haven't made too much progress either", "sure, some of the cancer effect could be because of pan-kinase inhibition as they claim but that test compound hits the proteasome too" or "animal models for sepsis have a horrible track record translating to humans." Or like a thousand other things, just in the areas I'm exposed to.

I'm really negative on the quality of most science journalism but reading the paper solves relatively little that's wrong with your typical story.
posted by mark k at 6:41 PM on September 26, 2016

I was really torn on this piece. I've never heard of a "close-hold embargo" before as a former science policy PR DC person. On the other hand I had a lot of questions about this op-Ed.

Seriously? Not giving the Fox News guy an embargo pass is the most egregious reporter favoritism this guy could dig up? You know, with their solid record of accurate and nuanced science reporting.

Also, I do think it's pretty sketch to ask sources to comment on regulations they have not had adequate time to read. Asking for quotes on a super complicated regulation that the source hasn't even read yet (since it has not been released) is...not exactly ethical either.
posted by forkisbetter at 2:56 PM on September 27, 2016 [2 favorites]