Journalism Under Bush's Off-The-Record Briefing Ground Rules

Open post to Brian Williams of NBC News:

In response to this from your Daily Nightly blog, in which you wrote

A number of television journalists gathered for lunch with the president at the White House today -- a practice becoming more and more common when this president has a major speech to deliver. The following is a review of my notes, and is offered here under the ground rules established by the assembled White House senior aides. Vice President Cheney attended but did not speak.

I realize that you don't publish my comments, pointed and critical as they are, but I hope that you are at least reading and considering them in the spirit in which they are offered.

Journalists are considered the 4th estate. To that end, the public relies on you (the plural you) to be assertive in pursuing clear, accurate and comprehensive information from reliable sources, and that you perform adequate fact-checking. Moreover, the public expects you to refrain from editorializing to the extent that is possible for educated humans to accomplish.

That translates into questioning and protesting such intolerable conditions as the "ground rules" that the White House is mandating for off-the-record briefings.

We, the people, supposedly elect those occupants of that branch, and we have full rights to know what the president and his cabinet (and whatever the heck the VP is calling his position in the branches these days) are doing, what his plans are, what his rationale is, what resources he is actually using, who his advisers are, etc.

It is not acceptable for NBC News, a la Tim Russert's court testimony, to assert that everything is assumed to be off the record as baseline, and that only when express permission is obtained, that sources are revealed.

To be blunt, that is un-American.

We now live in a topsy Orwellian world of doublespeak.

I am no politico, no genius and no one of import. But I highly recommend that you reacquaint yourself with Orwell's 1984 and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. Read some Morrow. Read some 1930's history.

Speak with your international print and television news colleagues. Try to step outside the US media market and look at it from a global point of view.

It's frightening. And you, your counterparts at ABC and CBS, and the anchors of the political commentary cable "news" shows are not meeting the public need.

What would be a good start?

In the transcripts, include the citations for all presented facts and sources.

In the NBC News Division, include professional CVs for all anchors, reporters, correspondents and news writers and researchers. Tell us your academic credentials, your professional experience, and even jobs held in other industries to help us understand your perspective.

Most important, provide full disclosure for any and all relationships between you and your subjects.

If you're still reading, I thank you!

Please consider hosting reader/blogger fora. Having Chris Colvin present her blog round-up twice weekly is a real treat, and she's first rate, but that's just a start.

It would be very interesting to have a working forum with key bloggers and NBC News staff to develop working relationships and to create some synergistic effects.

Not for "nuthin'" - it might be useful to get a better handle on the demographics of bloggers - especially those in the political blogosphere. My guess is that's where your market share growth is, but only if you learn how to tap in to the blogging fire hose.

Thanks for reading. I'm always open to criticism, too, and please don't hesitate to provide it. *g*

Chips and Cancer: Who Knew?

The AP published a story by Todd Lewan which is full of descriptions all sorts of problems with public safety, science and ethics in the US. Underlying it all is the active resistance to both governmental and private organizations and individuals to do the right thing. Over and over and over, known problems are hidden from view, and appointed government officials jump from their positions where they have oversight and regulatory authority to the very organizations for which they were charged to oversee on behalf of the public interest and safety.

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. The FDA found "reasonable assurance" the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005's top "innovative technologies."

This story chronicles the problems with the implanted RFID chips commonly found used in pet identification, but which have also passed FDA approval for use as medical identifiers in humans.

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.

"The transponders were the cause of the tumors," said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.

Leading cancer specialists reviewed the research for The Associated Press and, while cautioning that animal test results do not necessarily apply to humans, said the findings troubled them. Some said they would not allow family members to receive implants, and all urged further research before the glass-encased transponders are widely implanted in people.

To date, about 2,000 of the so-called radio frequency identification, or RFID, devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip Corp. The company, which sees a target market of 45 million Americans for its medical monitoring chips, insists the devices are safe, as does its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions, of Delray Beach, Fla.

Once again, a Republican appointee acted in a way that is a clear conflict of interest with his role as the head of the FDA and his jump to an agency that he should have had no dealings with in any capacity. HHS continues to exhibit this unethical pattern with Dr. John Agwunobi's leap from his Assistant Secretary of the HHS position to that of Wal-Mart's Director of Health and Wellness position.

In the latter case, the AMA and the state medical board where Agwunobi is licensed should take a hard look at this disturbing breach of the public trust. Public health officials deal with patients as communities, and this is surely a breach of the physician patient relationship. Who can trust Agwunobi when his alliance is clearly to an organization paying his salary instead of as a professional advocate - as his profession stipulates - to his patients?

The FDA also stands by its approval of the technology.

Did the agency know of the tumor findings before approving the chip implants? The FDA declined repeated AP requests to specify what studies it reviewed.

The FDA is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which, at the time of VeriChip's approval, was headed by Tommy Thompson. Two weeks after the device's approval took effect on Jan. 10, 2005, Thompson left his Cabinet post, and within five months was a board member of VeriChip Corp. and Applied Digital Solutions. He was compensated in cash and stock options.

Thompson, until recently a candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, says he had no personal relationship with the company as the VeriChip was being evaluated, nor did he play any role in FDA's approval process of the RFID tag.

"I didn't even know VeriChip before I stepped down from the Department of Health and Human Services," he said in a telephone interview.

Also making no mention of the findings on animal tumors was a June report by the ethics committee of the American Medical Association, which touted the benefits of implantable RFID devices.

Had committee members reviewed the literature on cancer in chipped animals?

No, said Dr. Steven Stack, an AMA board member with knowledge of the committee's review.

Was the AMA aware of the studies?

No, he said.

So much for protecting the public. The HHS, the FDA, the AMA - all of the agencies charged with assuring the public's safety and holding the public's trust - have not only failed to do that, but they actively undermine efforts to do what they are charged to do.

Where does that leave Americans?

Former US Surgeons General have testified that science is being distorted and suppressed. They have testified that the public's safety has been subjugated by political partisanship.

The first thing Americans must do is to mandate full Congressional oversight into the HHS, FDA, CDC, and all governmental agencies that are charged with protecting the public's safety.

Henry Waxman has introduced legislation to promote and to demand independence of the US Surgeon General position, and this is a good start.

The public must demand that the AMA, American Nurses Association, and the American Public Health Association put into place tough ethical conditions of membership, and that they publicly disclose members who are expelled or applications that are rejected for breaches of patient trust.

Congress must enact tough legislation that clearly prohibits any elected or appointed official from having any relationship with entities for which they have oversight or regulatory authority and responsibility. No more revolving door from comfy governmental position to private sector conflict of interest lobbying and advocacy. None. The policy must clearly and transparently be, if it appears to be a conflict of interest, it is, and therefore, it is not tolerated, nor is it acceptable.

The private sector is concerned with maximizing profits for its investors. Period.

Government is charged with protecting the public's welfare and safety.

Let the two remain separate and distinct entities.

And let the chips fall where they may. In Veri-Chip's case, may that be in a red bottom line for its egregiousness.

Reflections on Madeleine

Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.

Madeleine L'Engle died this past Thursday. The New York Times and The Washington Post published moving obituaries, and others' memoriams are beginning to make appearances on the internet.

I met Madeleine once at an author's reading, but we had passed each other many times on the streets of the Morningside Heights neighborhood where I had worked, and she had lived and worked.

Almost everyone's introduction to her books was with A Wrinkle In Time. She had said at the author's reading that it was frequently banned.

Banned?? Some souls with warped minds had conflated tessering with having sex. Found pornography in ananda. So sad, and yet, how well I have also been at the pointed end of slashing swords that slash only for the thrill of bloodlust.

I have enjoyed exploring her writing through the warp and weft of the Austins series, the Time series, and her exploration of questions, of universal language, of kairos, and of the Important Questions. I have loved her for her anger at God, of her unafraid questioning, and of her bold and brave and unabashed love of the singing of the spheres.

No matter how many times I read her work, I always was deeply moved during the reading and immersion in it. There's not a day that goes by that her influence isn't upon me and my life.

Madeleine, thank you for a life well-lived, generously shared and joyfully sung. The stars are making their joyful, universal and eternal music with you. We miss you here, and we're delighted that you are forever singing, harmonizing and deepening. Namaste.

From the About.com website, here are some quotes from Madeleine. Enjoy, remember, and discover:

Selected Madeleine L'Engle Quotations

• Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth.

• You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

• Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

• We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

• Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

• A book comes and says, "Write me." My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

• That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

• We tend to think things are new because we've just discovered them.

• We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need defending.

• I share Einstein's affirmation that anyone who is not lost on the rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe "is as good as a burnt out candle."

• Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might.

• The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

• Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

• Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

• I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, "This is what I believe. Finished." What I believe is alive ... and open to growth.

• If it can be verified, we don't need faith.... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

• What I believe is so magnificent, so glorious, that it is beyond finite comprehension. To believe that the universe was created by a purposeful, benign Creator is one thing. To believe that this Creator took on human vesture, accepted death and mortality, was tempted, betrayed, broken, and all for love of us, defies reason. It is so wild that it terrifies some Christians who try to dogmatize their fear by lashing out at other Christians, because tidy Christianity with all answers given is easier than one which reaches out to the wild wonder of God's love, a love we don't even have to earn.

• We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

• In the evening of life we shall be judged on love, and not one of us is going to come off very well, and were it not for my absolute faith in the loving forgiveness of my Lord I could not call on him to come.

• Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.

• Deepest communion with God is beyond words, on the other side of silence.

• I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

• So I go to church, not because of any legalistic or moralistic reasons, but because I am a hungry sheep who needs to be fed; and for the same reason that I wear a wedding ring: a public witness of a private commitment.