WASHINGTON 2002
The Invisible Agencies
"I know one thing. I’m not going to be covering any of those dreary regulatory agencies."
— Maureen Dowd, of The New York Times, in Edwin Diamond’s book, Behind the Times.
You and your family, not to mention your readers and viewers, probably eat chicken. But you and they may not know that the roaster you toss on the grill could harbor drug-resistant bacteria that could make you sick with an illness that’s becoming hard to treat.
Or that that bologna and those hot dogs neatly stacked in the supermarket cooler might be tainted with listeria, a deadly bacterium that survives refrigeration. Or that the Department of Agriculture has yet to enact a rule that would make either of those foods safer.
Alarming revelations for sure. But covering regulation has never been high on Washington media’s Prestige-O-Meter, and it has barely sounded the alarm. What the government does to safeguard the food supply, as well as the cars we drive, the air we breathe, the place we work, and the water we drink are subjects that have always taken a backseat to more glamorous beats like the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon.
But in recent years — and even more since 9/11 — the agencies have moved further off the radar scope. “Ninety percent of Washington reporters have no clue where those agencies are even located,” says James Warren, former Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune.
Yet to most ordinary folks what Ari Fleischer said last night about the president’s latest trip is not as important as the possibility that their kids might eat contaminated food at the local fast-food restaurant. Why don’t more reporters and editors see the agencies for what they are — a fertile field of stories to be harvested and shared with a public that cares plenty about its own health and safety?
Sometimes government keeps a close eye on the regulated businesses; at other times it hardly pays attention. Media interest has also ebbed and flowed, often in tandem with the reigning Washington political thought.
Which is unfortunate. “The only hope of making the agencies work better is for the press to cover them and expose what is happening,” says The Washington Monthly’s founder, Charles Peters (read Peters' story, Eternal Washington). “They will improve when the fear of exposing them outweighs the influence of the lobbyists.”
One way to cover regulation is to cover congressional oversight of it, says Morton Mintz, a former Washington Post reporter known for aggressive coverage of the agencies. But now he says, “The hearings aren’t there to be covered.” Instead of months of hearings on drug safety or drug industry profits, Mintz says, members of Congress today are more likely to ask why the Food and Drug Administration isn’t approving new drugs faster.
In the heyday of strong congressional oversight, journalists worked closely with congressional staff people to break important stories about questionable business practices and what the agencies were doing to curb them. “We were aided and abetted by members of Congress who had a killer instinct and a feel for the issues,” says Saul Friedman, who covered Washington for the Detroit Free Press and is now a columnist at Newsday. “There was a symbiosis between young newspaper people and members of Congress who cared. The symbiosis and the gut instincts are just no longer there.”
They may be victims of a changing journalistic culture. “With government regulatory issues, there’s no time bomb, no explosion, no sex, no intrigue,” says former Senator David Pryor of Arkansas. With no finale, no fat lady singing, the media have less interest.
Sometimes the story is about what is not happening — and “it’s hard to stir up reporting over inaction,” says Dr. Ellen Silbergeld, a professor at the University of Maryland who has been involved in environmental regulatory issues over the years. “How much excitement can you get over another review of dioxin?” The real story, however, is not just “another review” but why an agency is sitting on some rule or regulation and what happens to the public while it sits.
Meanwhile, watchdog groups that monitor the agencies say that enthusiasm these days from the press for what they uncover has waned. One example is the increasing use of cost-benefit analysis to evaluate proposed rules and regulations. Such analysis often involves assumptions and analytical tools that are open to question, such as weighing health or safety benefits in the future (decreased cancer from clean water, for example) as less important than saving money today. According to Reece Rushing, a senior policy analyst at OMB Watch, a public interest watchdog group, the Bush administration is relying more and more on cost-benefit analysis to determine which regulations get adopted, but the press is not interested, so the public is clueless about the issue. “All the players are involved — the business community, the public interest lobbyists, the think tanks,” he says. “It’s a big-ticket item for everyone but the media.”
Danielle Brian, who heads another watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), says she tried for six years to interest mainstream media in writing about how the oil companies were cheating the government out of royalties for extracting oil from public lands. The government was losing some $70 million annually, she says, because the industry was paying a price it had arbitrarily set rather than the fair market value.
The mainstream media finally sniffed a story only after a political brouhaha surfaced. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, looking out for her home-state constituents, tried to block an Interior Department regulation ordering the oil companies to pay the fair market value. She attached a rider to a bill, which would have withheld money the department needed to implement the regulation. When Senator Barbara Boxer of California announced she would oppose Hutchison’s rider, reporters sensed a political fight and the story became news — editorials and news stories in publications like The Washington Post, Business Week, and on ABC World News Tonight.
Today, reporters don’t have time to do the groundwork or dig out the context, Brian says. Instead of merely handing them a document and pointing reporters in the direction of a good story, POGO now packages the story into a report complete with executive summaries and press releases. Everything is spelled out.
Reporting on the regulatory beat, of course, is hard. It requires a reporter to know science, law, administrative procedure, and politics. Journalists must understand the industry in question and the subtleties of regulation — what’s proposed, what the regulated industries prefer, and how the public will be affected. Learning all this takes time. Where once reporters like George Anthan, who covered food safety regulations for the Des Moines Register, could spend weeks plowing through stacks of inspection records at the Department of Agriculture, reporters now tend to want and need something quick and dirty.
Bureau chiefs are candid about the problems they face in freeing up reporters to spend weeks at a regulatory agency. They also know they are missing good stories if they don’t. “It takes real fortitude for a bureau chief to pull a reporter away from daily news and say there’s a larger, more important story that no one else will get but you,” says Andy Alexander, the bureau chief for Cox Newspapers. Alexander’s bureau of nine reporters must report Washington news for seventeen newspapers, all of which may have different regional interests on any given day. Same story at Scripps Howard, where bureau chief Peter Copeland notes that the newshole for Washington and regulatory coverage has been steadily shrinking.
Maybe that explains why some of the best reporting on the regulatory beat is done by trade-press reporters, whose job it is to accurately report the nuances of regulation for the regulated industries that have profits riding on the agency decisions. For example, Allison Beers, who recently left her post as managing editor of Food Chemical News, became an expert on the workings of the Department of Agriculture when she was covering food safety regulation, and her stories stand out. “People who cover my area tend to cover the big things — a court case, something the secretary of agriculture said. But if it is some directive the government quietly issued to its inspection force, who’s going to pick that up?” she asks.
Who, indeed? Productivity pressures encourage reporters to wait for the soundbite or press release, build a one-day story, and move on. There’s little to encourage a reporter to hang around an agency, cultivate sources, and learn complex issues that some day might turn into a story. “We cover agencies depending on what they have to say,” admits Sandy Johnson, the AP’s Washington bureau chief.
Over at the FDA, the public affairs officer Lawrence Bachorik says that more often than not, stories about the FDA originate in his agency. “We are making the news,” he says. But if the agencies control what is covered and feed journalists only the stories they want told, and journalists come to rely on their handouts, where will the public get the real story?
The traditional way of thinking about the agencies as discrete beats may be outdated in today’s complex scientific and legal environment, and a new way of looking at the issues may be in order. “We need to figure out a way to cover regulation more exhaustively and more creatively,” says William Serrin, a professor of journalism at New York University. “Not just the Pentagon but the military; not just the IRS but taxes; not just the FDA but food safety.”
There is a glimmer of hope. A few bureau chiefs say they are starting to look at regulation in a more global way. Copeland of Scripps Howard notes that his bureau has carved out areas that encompass several regulatory agencies — the environment, which he says they have defined to mean sprawl, education, and health. “We decided to become centers of excellence in those topics,” he says. John Walcott, the new bureau chief at Knight Ridder, says the bureau’s new investigative team “will be sniffing out things at the regulatory agencies.”
Changing the priorities, though, may mean changing the way Washington
news is defined. Perhaps journalists should stop looking for the
pegs, the hooks, the dramatic events, and begin finding ways to
convey the subtlety of these topics and why they are important
to the public. Perhaps when it comes to the regulatory beat, we
should take the lead in defining the news, as some bureaus are
beginning to, rather than waiting for some agency to do it for
us. When reporters focus on Washington’s backwaters, it’s
amazing what they can find.
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