Bizarre message discipline at the NHTSA

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is filled with experts on cars, transportation, accident data, safety measures, bridge integrity, and the like. Occasionally, reporters might have a question about one of these issues, so they’ll call the NHTSA to utilize this public, taxpayer-financed expertise.

But that’s apparently no longer an option. Readers G.D. and W.H. alerted me to this unbelievable report from the NYT’s Christopher Jensen, who covers the automotive beat for the paper of record.

Jensen found that the NHTSA won’t even allow its communications office to go on the record in acknowledging the name of the agency’s director. The agency charged with providing public information about the nation’s top automotive safety agency forbids staffers from answering reporters’ questions.

The policy is the brainchild of NHTSA Administrator Nicole Nason, who took control of the agency in May 2006.

I found this out recently when I asked to talk to an N.H.T.S.A. researcher about some technical safety issues in which he had a great deal of expertise. Agency officials told me I could talk to the expert on a background basis, but if I wanted to use any information or quotes from him, that would have to be worked out later with a N.H.T.S.A. official. The arrangement struck me as manipulative, and I declined to agree to it. It seems that Ms. Nason has adopted a policy that has blocked virtually all of her staff — including the communications office — from providing any information to reporters on the record, which means that it can be attributed. As an alternative I was told I could interview Ms. Nason on the record (instead of the expert on the subject of my article). I declined, failing to see how her appointment as administrator — she was trained as a lawyer — made her an expert in that subject. When I said I would like to talk to Ms. Nason on the record about her no-attribution policy, she was not available.

Got that? You can’t talk to the expert, but you can talk to the politically-appointed boss. If you want to talk to the boss about why you can’t talk to the expert, the boss is no longer available.

Wait, it gets funnier.



The agency’s new policy effectively means that some of the world’s top safety researchers are no longer allowed to talk to reporters or to be freely quoted about automotive safety issues that affect pretty much everybody. “My God,” said Joan Claybrook, who was N.H.T.S.A. administrator from 1977 to 1981 and is now president of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group. Given that N.H.T.S.A. is the leading source of automotive safety information in the United States, its researchers are public officials and people are entitled to “know what information they have, whether it is on paper or in their heads,” Ms. Claybrook said. […] [I]t is a radical change from the way N.H.T.S.A has operated for at least 20 years. In the past, reporters could talk to its experts and the agency was proud to discuss its research and accomplishments.

The NYT’s Jensen talked to Nason’s chief of staff, David Kelly, who said that the agency’s new administration felt the change was necessary because and “we were finding a lot of stuff did not need to be on the record.”

After Jensen and Kelly talked on the phone, Kelly insisted that he did not want to be quoted and had intended to speak only on background. Jensen quoted him anyway, deciding the official couldn’t make up ground-rules after the fact.

I’ve heard of message discipline, but this is ridiculous.