Tuesday, September 27, 2011

A ‘Soviet-Style Power-Grab,’ to Squelch Bad Press for ObamaCare 
From Will at The Other News:
The Department of Health and Human Services has released new guidelines on communications between department employees and the media. The guidelines evidently require all communications to be approved by the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. Also: no off-the-record communications.
The media are not happy. The editor of FDA Webview & FDA Review writes (via Poynter; more here):
The new formal HHS Guidelines on the Provision of Information to the News Media represent, to this 36-year veteran of reporting FDA news, a Soviet-style power-grab. By requiring all HHS employees to arrange their information-sharing with news media through their agency press office, HHS has formalized a creeping information-control mechanism that informally began during the Clinton Administration and was accelerated by the Bush and Obama administrations. 
The U.S. now takes a large step toward joining other information-controlling countries like my native Australia, where government employees who talk with the news media without permission commit a federal crime. I came to the U.S. in 1974 to escape this oppression.
The HHS guidelines once again show that the purpose of a public information office is not to disseminate information to the public but to withhold information from the public
Since this came on the heels of an HHS official announcing that the agency is scuttling ObamaCare‘s long-term care entitlement, a.k.a. the “CLASS Act,” one wonders if there is a connection. Or maybe HHS is just motivated by a general fear that the more the public learns about ObamaCare, the less we will like it. 
Read the full story here.

1 comment:

Epaminondas said...

We are ONE BIG INCIDENT away from the justifications for a ministry of truth style treatment of the press.

The ideologues TRULY BELIEVE they are doing the good work and those who interfere with this are not serving the good, and are therefore serving what is wrong and in fact evil.

By serving the good without question they will justify the most heinous amputations of truth and rights to the truth imaginable and do so with untrammeled consciences.

These people cannot be thrown out soon enough. They are doing damage it will take generations to reverse

IF


WE

CAN