EPA Officials Demand Anonymity: Hush-hush conference calls anger reporters. (CJR)

EPA Officials Demand Anonymity
May 07, 2010 02:47 PM
“Hush-hush” conference calls anger reporters

By Curtis Brainard

Twice in the last three months, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ordered reporters not to name the agency officials participating in media conference calls, frustrating a number of the journalists involved.

The latest incident happened Tuesday, when the EPA arranged a teleconference in order to discuss a long-awaited plan to regulate coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal for electricity that contains toxic chemicals like arsenic, lead, and mercury. The agency announced the call mere hours before it took place, however. Moreover, the advisory it sent to reporters noted that:



Robert McClure, the chief environmental correspondent at Investigate West, sent an e-mail to EPA press secretary Adora Andy shortly before the call, registering his objection and urging the agency to allow the other officials to be quoted by name. Later, the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), where McClure is a member and sits on the First Amendment Task Force, sent a formal letter of complaint to the EPA, a copy of which was obtained by CJR.

“It goes against best practices in transparency for public officials to demand anonymity,” wrote SEJ president Christy George, who did not take part in the teleconference on Tuesday. “Public officials work for the public, and should be on the record. If someone does not wish to be on the record, that person should not speak at a press conference.”

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“We don’t use a lot of anonymous source stuff here at the Gazette, and these are high-level people,” Ward said. “It isn’t like this is some inspector out in some field office who has never talked to a reporter before. These are sophisticated professionals who have been in and out of government for a long time. They are completely capable of answering on-the-record questions from reporters, and that’s the way it ought to work.”

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In a blog post at Investigate West, McClure argued that, “This kind of horse hockey has been par for the course at some agencies in D.C. for some time, such as the State Department and the White House. But EPA, from the time it was founded up in the early ’70s until the administration of George W. Bush, remained quite open. Which is as it should be. We’re talking about the air we all breathe and the water we all drink, after all.”

the rest: http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/epa_officials_demand_anonymity.php

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

The voice of EPA

That was an odd press conference yesterday with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson regarding new national rules on the handling of coal combustion waste, which I wrote about here.

Reporters were invited (on one-hour notice) to call the EPA, where apparently Jackson, her press person Adora Andy, and an unknown number of other people were in a room with a speakerphone. Jackson started with a statement, and then reporters were called upon one by one to ask a question or two.

That's the good part. And, it was nice that Jackson stayed around long enough to field some questions.

But she left 25 minutes into the hour-long telephone news conference, and that's where it got strange.

Reporters had been told they could not quote or paraphrase by name the other high-ranking EPA officials who were on hand to explain the details of this massive and complex regulatory package, and the people on the other end of the line were not identified until after they had spoken and the press conference was about to end -- and then only by name, so quickly that it was hard to hear.