secrecy

The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly has announced that it will begin reporting its payments to doctors in late 2009, using an online database. But the disclosure is limited to payments of more than $500 made for giving talks or advice to the company; payments for other services or gifts will not be included. Payments made before 2009 will also not be disclosed. Eli Lilly president and CEO John Lechleiter explained the move by stating, "We've learned that letting people see for themselves what we're doing is the best way to build trust." In mid-2007, as the U.S. Senate Finance Committee was investigating drug company grants to patient groups, Eli Lilly began disclosing its grants to U.S. nonprofit groups and educational institutions. Its new registry of payments to doctors comes as Congress considers the Physician Payments Sunshine Act. The bill would require disclosure of any drug company payment to doctors of more than $25, whether the payment was for food, travel, entertainment, gifts, consulting fees or any other purpose.

In Bolivia, anti-government protests have led to dozens of deaths. President Evo Morales claimed the United States is supporting the violent groups and asked U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg to leave. The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), pointing to earlier reports that the U.S. Embassy "had repeatedly asked Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright Scholar to spy on people inside Bolivia," says Morales may have a point. So CEPR is calling on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) "and other U.S. agencies to 'come clean'" about which groups they support, in Bolivia. "Despite numerous requests ... the U.S. has not turned over all the names of recipient organizations of USAID funds." In related news, USAID "is looking to hire a PR firm to tout its work in Bolivia as diplomatic relations have strained with the left-leaning South American country," reports O'Dwyer's. USAID will pay $500,000 for the first year of an up to three year contract, "to highlight its emergency supply efforts, opportunities for the poor, and other economic and social welfare programs it has funded in Bolivia."

A coalition of "consumer and good government groups, librarians, environmentalists, labor leaders, journalists, and others," OpenTheGovernment.org, has found that secrecy by the Bush administration continues to expand. The top twenty-five government departments in terms of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests all continued to carry serious backlogs. In 2007 there was a two percent increase in FOIA requests over 2006, as well as a decrease in the number of documents declassified. "These trends indicate that citizens will have to wait even longer to know what their government is doing," said Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org. Government secrecy is also expensive for taxpayers. "The report estimated the government spent almost $200 to maintain secrets for every dollar the government spent declassifying documents, a five percent increase over the 2006 ratio." McDermott added, "The current administration continues to refuse to be held accountable to the public. In recent years, polls have shown that a growing number of Americans believe the federal government is secretive -- terrible news for our democracy. Until we restore openness and accountability to the federal government, it will be impossible to win back the public's trust."

Tobacco manufacturers discovered over 40 years ago that radioactive polonium-210 exists in cigarettes and tobacco smoke, and spent decades working to remove it, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The companies tried to remove polonium -- a naturally-occurring, alpha particle-emitting constituent of the fertilizers and soil used to grow tobacco -- by creating special filters, washing the tobacco leaf and genetically altering tobacco plants, but ultimately failed. Instead of coming clean, the companies kept their internal research on polonium and information about their unsuccessful efforts to remove it secret. They didn't want to heighten public awareness of polonium in cigarettes. Polonium-210 is the lethal radioactive substance that was used to poison Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

Pro-Tibet Protest During the OlympicsIn a scathing review of the Chinese government's handling of the Olympics, Jacquelin Magnay writes "there has been the fake singer, the fake fireworks, the fake minority kids (they were all Han, and not from the 55 different ethnic groups as portrayed), the fake press freedoms, fake internet access, fake promises. ... Beijing Olympic vice-president Wang Wei and other International Olympic Committee officials repeatedly claim the press is free to report on the Olympic Games, yet venue managers, under instruction from the organisers, will not allow reporters to ask topical non-sporting questions of Georgian or Russian athletes. Transcripts of the press conference questions about censorship are themselves heavily censored." But, regardless of the edicts from the Chinese government's propaganda unit, "global headlines ... have detailed the screech of armoured personnel carriers, human rights issues, visa restrictions, protest parks, military thuggery, deceptions and trickery."

Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "Daily Show"An article in the New York Times asks whether Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show has become the most trusted man in America, pointing out that his fake news comedy show has emerged in recent years as a "genuine cultural and political force." While 24-hour news networks like FOX, MSNBC and CNN have been pumping out infotainment-style news about topics like dead celebrities and sexual predators, the Daily Show has been critically tracking the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush Administration to increase the power of the executive branch. Stewart has proven to be a master at calling out government and corporate spin, hypocrisy and red herrings, and helping his audience see them, too. A 2008 study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Enter for the People and the Press found that the Daily Show has had an impact on American dialogue and that it is "getting people to think critically about the public square."

"The former spokeswoman for Arlington National Cemetery says the facility's No. 2 official has been calling military families to try to talk them out of media coverage of their loved ones' funerals, despite his denials that he does so," reports William H. McMichael. "Gina Gray, who was fired June 27 after 2½ months on the job, said Deputy Director Thurman Higginbotham told her in early May that he had been making such calls for about a year -- while denying he did so at least three times, including once in an April 30 meeting with Pentagon reporters to discuss the cemetery's media policy." Gray said she reviewed the cemetery's paperwork for troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001 and found that 63 percent of the families agreed to media coverage. She says that her support for granting media access "led her supervisors to limit her authority, constantly track her comings and goings, occasionally refuse to reply to her e-mails or even speak to her and, finally, to fire her."

As reporters and researchers know all too well, releasing information isn't necessarily the same thing as releasing useful information.

Pentagon pundit Ken AllardCase in point: the Pentagon's military analyst program. In early 2002, the Defense Department began cultivating "key influentials" -- retired military officers who are frequent media commentators -- to help the Bush administration make the case for invading Iraq. The program expanded over the years, briefing more participants on a wider range of Bush administration talking points, occasionally taking them overseas on the government's dime.

In April 2006, the group was used to counter criticism of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The apparent coordination between the Pentagon and the pundits piqued the interest of New York Times reporters. Two years later -- after wresting some 8,000 pages of internal documents from the Defense Department -- the Times exposed the Pentagon's covert attempts to shape public opinion through its so-called "message force multipliers." A few weeks later, the Defense Department posted the same documents publicly.

It wasn't the high-octane data dump it first appeared to be. Sure, paging through the emails, slides and briefing papers is interesting, and occasionally you come across something noteworthy. But the documents are formatted in such a way that systematically exploring them via keyword searches is impossible. A cynic (or realist) might think the Pentagon was doing damage control by putting the documents out in the open, while making it near-impossible to find crucial needles in a very large, chaotically-compiled haystack.

If you're looking for "real reporting" these days, Glenn Greenwald thinks a lot of it is coming from whistleblowers and advocacy groups rather than from journalists. "If one looks at most of the vital disclosures of the last seven years -- whereby concealed, legally dubious behavior of one of the most secretive administrations of the modern era is exposed -- one finds that such exposure comes overwhelmingly from two sources: (1) conscientious whistle-blowers inside the Government, and (2) advocacy groups such as the ACLU, which have tirelessly waged one litigation battle after the next in order to unearth the Bush administration's secret, improper conduct," he writes. "The record of the establishment press over the last seven years is one characterized far more by failure and complicity than by real journalism. ... The function of the ACLU and similar groups isn't really to uncover illegal behavior on the part of our Government. That is the intended function of the Congress, the media and the opposition party. But those institutions haven't done that. ... As a result, the ACLU and similar groups -- with far fewer resources -- have been forced first to uncover what the Government does, to try methodically and incrementally to erode the government's wall of secrecy, to perform real journalism, in order then to engage in their real function of opposing Government encroachments and defending the Constitution, basic privacy rights and civil liberties."

Melissa Sweet, a freelance Australian health journalist, reports that she recently received an email from a staffer with the private intelligence company Hakluyt. In it, she was asked if she would like to become part of a "network of well-placed individuals around the world who are able to provide us, very discreetly, with intelligence on specific commercial or political issues that may arise." In particular, they were seeking her assistance for an anonymous "financial institution" client, on "a new project on the new Australian government's healthcare policy -- how realistic their reform ambitions really are," "the role of the private sector" and other matters. Sweet responded by pointing out that she was a journalist, not a consultant. Undeterred, the Hakluyt staffer responded that as a journalist, she was likely to have "dozens of well-placed sources in the field" and that the company already works with "a number of quality, usually specialist journalists." In 2001 Hakluyt was outed for infiltrating Greenpeace in Europe.