Credit: Sébastien Thibault
It was a Faustian bargain—and it certainly made editors at National Public Radio squirm.
The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA would dictate whom NPR’s reporter could and couldn’t interview.
“My editors are uncomfortable with the condition that we cannot seek reaction,” NPR reporter Rob Stein wrote back to the government officials offering the deal. Stein asked for a little bit of leeway to do some independent reporting but was turned down flat. Take the deal or leave it.
NPR took the deal. “I’ll be at the briefing,” Stein wrote.
Later that day in April 2014, Stein—along with reporters from more than a dozen other top-tier media organizations, including CBS, NBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—showed up at a federal building to get […]
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump acknowledges photographers after speaking at a campaign rally in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Thursday, February 11, 2016.
Credit: AP / Gerald Herbert
Recently, sorting through a pile of old children’s books, I came across a volume, That Makes Me Mad!, which brought back memories. Written by Steve Kroll, a long-dead friend, it focused on the eternally frustrating everyday adventures of Nina, a little girl whose life regularly meets commonplace roadblocks, at which point she always says… well, you can guess from the title! Vivid parental memories of another age instantly flooded back—of my daughter (now reading such books to her own son) sitting beside me at age 5 and hitting that repeated line with such mind-blowing, ear-crushing gusto that you knew it spoke to the everyday frustrations of her life, to what made her mad.
Three decades later, in an almost unimaginably […]
Nestlé dropped its conditions, including pump tests for quality, to win the bid.
Credit: : Raúl Hernández González/flickr
Corporate giant Nestlé continued its privatization creep on Thursday as it won approval to take over another Canadian community’s water supply, claiming it needed the well to ensure “future business growth.”
Nestlé purchased the well near Elora, Ontario from Middlebrook Water Company last month after making a conditional offer in 2015, the Canadian Press reports.
In August, the Township of Centre Wellington made an offer to purchase the Middlebrook well site to protect access to the water for the community. Consequently, the multinational—which claimed it had no idea the community was its competitor—waived all its conditions and matched the township’s offer in order to snag the well for itself.
Those conditions included conducting pump tests to determine if the watershed met the company’s quality and quantity requirements, the Canadian Press reports.
Moreover, Nestlé has […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
