http://reason.com/blog/2016/09/23/the-se...to-control

Quote:The Secret Tool the FDA Uses to Control News Reports About Its Decisions

The agency relies on “close-hold embargoes” to restrict reporters from contacting outside sources about FDA stories.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), apparently not satisfied with exerting a considerable and often wildly inappropriate amount of control over what people can put in their bodies, has also taken extraordinary and secretive steps to control what sorts of information people can read about the agency's decisions.

To understand how the FDA controls news about its policies, you have to understand news embargoes, in which a source agrees to provide information if reporters agree to hold the news until a specific time.

Embargoes are a widely employed and often useful part of journalism: They can help give reporters time to go over stories—especially those with complex, technical aspects—carefully, and can help ensure that critics and opinion writers don't feel pressured to rush to judgment. Embargoes, in other words, give reporters the opportunity to think, clarify, and work through a story without worrying about getting scooped. And in the process, they can help create better journalism. Or at least that's the hope.

The flip side, of course, is that embargoes can also be used by sources to control stories, at least to some extent. By forcing every outlet to agree to the same embargo, PR operators can ensure that there's a flood of stories all at once, making it seem like something—usually a product that someone is trying to sell—is suddenly everywhere in the news. Embargoes can also be used to keep negative news and reviews from leaking before a product hits the market. In at least one case I'm aware of, video game critics, in exchange for early access to a game, were forced to agree to an embargo that didn't lift until 12 hours after the game was available to buy online.

Traditionally, the limiting factor on embargoes stories is just time. But according to scathing report in Scientific American, the FDA has recently been adding another factor for sharing news with early reporters: No outside sourcing. This turns into what is called a "close-hold embargo."

The FDA initially attempted to impose a close-hold embargo in 2011, according to the story, but updated its official embargo policy to allow reporters to contact third parties following complaints by journalists. Except that apparently the FDA secretly went ahead with a close-hold embargo strategy anyway, despite its own publicly posted rules. And according to snippets from an agency memo published by Scientific American, the explicit goal is to shape and control news coverage:

BUT WHO WILL SAVE US FROM KNOWING THE TRUTH HARMFUL CORPORATIONS TRYING TO KILL US EVERY SECOND OF THE DAY?!