{"id":138027,"date":"2014-08-22T19:06:04","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T19:06:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=138027"},"modified":"2014-08-22T19:06:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T19:06:29","slug":"u-s-government-vetting-journalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/media-news\/u-s-government-vetting-journalists\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Government Vetting Journalists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>David Sirota<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">As states move to hide details of government deals with Wall Street, and as politicians come up with new arguments to defend secrecy, a study released earlier this month revealed that many government information officers block specific journalists they don&#8217;t like from accessing information. The news comes as 47 federal inspectors general sent a letter to lawmakers criticizing &#8220;serious limitations on access to records&#8221; that they say have &#8220;impeded&#8221; their oversight work.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">The data about public information officers was compiled over the past few years by Kennesaw State University professor Dr. Carolyn Carlson. Her surveys found that 4 in 10 public information officers say &#8220;there are specific reporters they will not allow their staff to talk to due to problems with their stories in the past.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">&#8220;That horrified us that so many would do that,&#8221; Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review, which reported on her presentation at the July conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Carlson has conducted surveys of journalists and public information officers since 2012. In her most recent survey of 445 working journalists, four out of five reported that &#8220;their interviews must be approved&#8221; by government information officers, and &#8220;more than half of the reporters said they had actually been prohibited from interviewing [government] employees at least some of the time by public information officers.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.opednews.com\/articles\/The-U-S-government-s-cree-by-David-Sirota-FOIA_Government-Accountability_Information_Journalistic-Cooperation-140822-380.html\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Sirota As states move to hide details of government deals with Wall Street, and as politicians come up with new arguments to defend secrecy, a study released earlier this month revealed that many government information officers block specific journalists they don&#8217;t like from accessing information. The news comes as 47 federal inspectors general sent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":106687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-138027","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-media-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}