This is something we have looked at. Commanders have often taken steps individually to curb this. My question is, are you thinking about unifying that . Are you thinking of the best practices, guidelines for alcohol . What i just talked about has been discussed. In the meetings i have been in, we have not discussed it in the form of making it, across the services. We have left it to command at this point. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We will see you in here soon. [indiscernible] we are all done. On the cspan networks, the air force association hosts a discussion on military Defense Strategies and planning during a time of tightening budgets. On cspan two. The new America Foundation examines electronic surveillance and human rights with access now. That is live at 6 00 p. M. Here on cspan. Next, a discussion about the role of Public Government Affairs officers offices. Posted by the National Press tee, this is commit an hour and a half. Welcome to the National Press club, and this evenings discussion of whether or not federal Public Affairs offices have become a hindrance more than a help to press freedom and open government. Or if you like, our shorter title. My name is john donnelly. Im a reporter with Congressional Quarterly and roll call. Im chairman of the National Press clubs press freedom committee, sponsoring tonights event along with the young members committee. You can find out more about the National Press club and membership therein at press. Org. Is being event broadcast, webcast on that site. It will be archived there later. It is also being broadcast on c span two right now. If you are following us on twitter, the handler is pressclubtv and opengovernment. Note, theprogramming panelists presentations will be available at a website called paosandreporters. Blogspot. Com. I want to say that as a reporter, i should disclose that i am biased in favor of as much openness and disclosure as possible, and as few rules as possible about who can talk to reporters and how. Recognize that Public Affairs has an indispensable job to do. I would like to make a few comments to set the stage for tonights events. Our discussion is about the growing and some say harmful role played by Public Affairs offices in the federal government. The complaints we hear from reporters are about widespread requirements that paos must be present during interviews, questions be written in advance, and only certain people can be made available to say certain things. What is most chilling our federal rules that require employees to only speak to reporters through official Public Affairs generals. The courts have sided with these rules. They have found that Government Employees dont have an unbridled First Amendment right when they are talking about official, Public Information. That was a 2006 Supreme Court ruling. It was a narrow decision, 54. That was their ruling. To a noneaking, lawyer, it doesnt appear these rules are going anywhere. In many agencies, the rules encourage but dont require. No matter which way it happens, the message seems to be that its not good for your career to talk to a reporter offline, even if the subject is not classified or proprietary. A couple weeks ago, we had a former nsa official turned whistleblower thomas drake here at a press club luncheon. He said that when federal employees are seeking to obtain or renew security clearances and are interviewed by investigators, one of the questions they are asked is whether the employee has ever had unauthorized contact with a reporter. Not unauthorized contact involving classified or proprietary information, but any unauthorized contact. To a lot of us, that was disturbing. We thought im merely asking that question in that context im merely asking that question in that context, they are sending a message that speaking to the press offline is forbidden and could make you a security risk. The Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden leaks have raised the temperature on this issue, particularly in the security agencies. The no leaks message was made in a hardcore way. In a june 2012 Defense Department document, about a so called Insider Threat program, it was obtained recently by mcclatchy news. It said, quote, hammer this fact home. Leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the u. S. If that was equally applied, there were be a lot of Senior Administration officials in this administration and previous ones who would be in a lot of trouble. Its not equally applied. It net effect of all this, is a real deterrent to people speaking to the press outside of official channels. Yet it often has to happen for the truth to come out. Let me be clear about a couple of things. Weve reporters appreciate public Affairs Officers when they help. They very often do. I dont know anyone who wants to do away with these officers. And if they didnt want it, its not going to happen. That is not on the table for discussion. Most reporters understand that a job of Public Affairs is to make sure that their agencys point of view is expressed coherently, and rogue voices are not confused with official policy. Im going to introduce our panel in one second. The pentagon has an interesting theirn what they call statement of principles about relations with the media. It says the Public Affairs officer should, quote, actively a zones, but not interfere with the reporting process. That sounds like a great summary to me of where we should end up. Everybody would probably agree with that. The rub comes in defining what peers to be interference. Appears to be interference. Going to introduce our panelists and get them a few minutes to weigh in with their take on the issue. Timewe will have q a appear, and then we will open it up to you all in the audience. Lets meet our panel. Carolyn colson, former Associated Press reporter and assistant professor of communication. The author of two surveys on the relationship between Public Affairs staff in the press. Next is Catherine Fox all, freelance reporter a member of the press club press freedom committee. Then comes linda peterson, managing editor of the valley journals of salt lake, the freedom of information chair for the society of professional journalists, and the president of the Utah Foundation for open government. To my left and youre right, tony fratto, managing partner at Hamilton Place strategies, a Strategic Communications and Crisis Management consultancy. Tony is an onair contributor on the cnbc Business News network. He was formerly Deputy Assistant to president george w. Bush. John verga, president elect of the National Association of government communicators. Starting with carolyn, lets see what you have to say about the subject. I want to tell you about a couple surveys i conducted this year and the Previous Year that are relevant to that topic. Reporters to cover all federal agencies in washington. Respondents for margin of error of about 7 . I surveyed current and former members of the National Association of government communicators. I bet 150 four responses with a margin of error of about 4. 3 . 154 responses, with a margin of error about 4. 3 . Focused on the interview process. I want to talk about preapproval and routing. Believe they have a better idea than reporters about who in their agency would be the best person to give an interview on a given topic. Three quarters of journalists reported that they had to get approval before they could interview an agency employee. Out of 10 reporters say that their requests for interviews were forwarded to paos. That is the interviewing process. Half reporters said that they were prohibited from interviewing altogether. Two thirds of the pao said they feel justified in refusing to grant interviews when agencys security is threatened, or when it might reveal damaging information. Three fourths of paos know the journalists try to go around them to contact Staff Members directly. Nine out of 10 say their staff theers know and refer reporters to the pao when contracted directly. More than half of the reporters say they do try to go around and circumvent the Public Affairs office at least some of the time. Issue of trust, the majority of paos say there are no reporters that they trust enough to contact staff directly without going to the Public Affairs office. Only about a third said they had reporters they would give free rein to contact staff without going to the Public Affairs office. According to my openended comment, most of the time these were longstanding beat reporters. 39. 6 of the paos said there were specific reporters they prohibited the staff from talking to altogether due to problems with their stories in the past. 40 said there were specific reporters they banned. 14 said there were whole Media Outlets they would ban their Staff Members from talking to because of problems with their stories in the past. On the issue of monitoring, two thirds of paos feeling was necessary to supervise, monitor interviews. 85 of reporters said they get monitored at least some of the time. , some the breaks down time, 16 said all of the time they get monitored. Three fourths of paos agree that monitoring the interviews is a good way to make sure their agency staff is quoted correctly in the stories. Paos said they use their tapes and notes from the interviews that they monitor to dispute misquotes. 17 said they tried to require reporters to review their quotes with them before publication. Three fourths of paos said they did not require republication reviews. I asked them attitude questions. The reporters view of paos control is pretty clear. Seven out of 10 reporters agreed that the statement, i consider Government Agency controls over who i interviewed to be a form of censorship. 85 percent agreed that the government was not getting the information needed by agencies imposing and journalistic practices. Pao attitudes were also unclear, controlling Media Coverage is an important part of protecting the reputation. Making sure that accurate, positive information from the agency is conveyed to the public. That is where the issue stands. As far as reporters in washington and public Affairs Officers. Thank you. Catherine . Not so long ago, some reporters walked the halls of agencies in unique, critically needed graduate schools they talked to and got to know staff, stories, perspective, and education. Just like this was the United States or something. Over the last 20 years, leaders have created a surge of blocking reporters from communicating to staff unless they are tracked and or monitored by the public Affairs Officers, the Public Relations controllers. It is massive, pernicious censorship that is now a cultural norm. No matter what they know, employees are prohibited from ever communicating with us without guards working at the behest of the bosses and the political structure. It is people in power stopping the flow of information to the public according to their own ideas and desires. How can the United States prohibit people from speaking without reporting to the authorities . Journalists, why are we so buffaloed . This is not some violent way of life, it is just a power grab that officials started pouring resources into relatively recently. The impact is drastic. I estimate that for many specialized reporters, communication with staff is down 90 . Never doubt the rotting, the debilitating effect of silencing people. The grave diggers at Arlington Cemetery knew about the jumbled graves for years. Janitors at penn state knew about the child abuse for years. So, what do we not know now . For one thing, in public, fda says congress has not given the agency all that it requested for monitoring the skyrocketing pharmaceutical imports. 40 of drugs now come from overseas. We urgently need reporters talking to fda people in policy jobs and in the front line inspecting jobs, away from the sensors. Regularly. Not just on big investigations. Does the import situation keep fda staff people up at night . Are we in predisaster mode, waiting for bodies to show up before we get serious . Or not . What would staff say away from the guards . It is something because it always is. It is unethical and inhumane to kill or confine information gathering. With millions of people silenced in thousands of public and private workplaces of various moral persuasions, reporters cannot hope that our skill and hard work are making up for this. The ethical burden is now right on journalists. We can fight this, or we can be the integral partner in ingraining it for the future. A warning about compromises. In our weakened state, some reporters say that they will go through the pio controls if they will just let me through without the delays, monitoring, blockages that have become so stunningly aggressive. That is a sellout of free speech. We will be passing on sterilized stories, modeling public understanding modeling public muddling public understanding understanding while lending power to an agency or political administration. And we ourselves, the reporters, will not see the difference. Finally, question. Why dont we, instead, have tracking and monitoring of all of the communications of all the Agency Leadership . Thank you. Catherine and carolyn have both done a good job at portraying what it is like at the federal level, but i want to talk about more than that. Many of you may, in the frustration of your job in washington, d. C. , have thought that maybe you should give up here and go to some backwoods community where i will not have to go through all of this, where i can just sit down and chew the fat with the mayor. I am here to tell you that there is no such community anymore. These policies, the way of doing business of government have not just trickled down, but have poured down to the smallest communities in our country. My papers cover eight communities, suburbs of Salt Lake City, with populations of anywhere from 10,000 100,000 people. O 100,000 and we deal with this on a regular basis. We can understand that the federal level there can be the reasoning of National Security, there can be the reasoning of national policy. But in a Small Community of 10,000 people it can get ridiculous. This spring i called a Small Community park and wreck person to find out the time of the local Easter Egg Hunt. He told me he could not tell me because he had been instructed not to speak to the press. Fortunately i went around him and found out the time for those many hundreds of parents and kids who wanted to show up. We get to this point all the time in the smaller communities. Most of the time the news that we cover is not earth shattering, it is of the day to day life that we live, the impact, the storm drain project you are so curious about because last year you sucked out 1 foot of water from your basement or the road repair you want to know about because, heck, it seems like you have been driving on the right road with orange cones forever. That rotten road with the orange cones forever. These of the things that they are obstructing us to find out about. We are running into the same situations in our neck of the woods, where they wanted to sit in with the engineer as they talk about road base and death and things like that. Truthfully i do not think that the pao would have the first clue of the engineer screwed up and set it backwards. Often because we cover these day in and day out, we know more than pao. A while ago, closer than 9 11, we were doing a story on the water tank, a 500 million gallon water tank in this rural community. I asked for the address and he told me that he could not give me the address because of Homeland Security concerns. Well, i do not know about you but i really do not think that a suburb of Salt Lake City in utah is a primary target for al qaeda. But he would not give it to me. What we did was we got in the car and we drove out to approximately where we knew it was. It is hard to hide a 500 million gallon tank. We wrote down the address and we published it. Nothing happened. Al qaeda must have us way down on their to do list. In suburban Salt Lake City we are just fine. These of the kinds of things were dealing with. We do have great pios that we work with to understand they are truly there to facilitate the flow of information, not control dam it, but to divert it and not to divert it, but to let it happen. We all understand that knowledge is power and anyone who has a teenager knows that information is power. That is what we are seeking. We are not generally