Categories: OLD Media Moves

Government agency asked for Bloomberg reporter’s employment contract

Jim Snyder and Danielle Ivory of Bloomberg News examine how federal government agencies have failed to comply with requests to provide details and expenses of travel, going as far as to threaten reporters who have asked for the information.

Snyder and Ivory write, “One Bloomberg reporter filed a 2012 request for information on gifts to and from foreign dignitaries. Following up past deadline, a State Department FOIA officer told her to ‘Go ahead and sue’ — before hanging up the phone.

“A Bloomberg FOIA filing seeking details of conference-related spending at the U.S. Agency for International Development was met with a request for a copy of the reporter’s employment contract and copies of news articles written within the last three years. USAID backed off after being reminded that under the law, individuals have the legal right to request public information without regard to profession.

“On Sept. 26, 2007, another Bloomberg reporter requested a memo on the work contractors were doing in Iraq that had been prepared for then-Defense Secretary Gates. More than five years later — on New Year’s Eve, 2012 — the Pentagon denied the request. It cited an exception to FOIA allowing the withholding of communications between the president and his top advisers, one of nine categories of information shielded from the law.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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  • Chris - That story is from 2013. Danielle is at the NY Times, and has been for over a year. Just FYI

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