(10/9/2009) FDA’s media access policies are unconstitutional, FDA Webview (www.fdaweb.com) editor Jim Dickinson argues in a 10/6 Citizen Petition which asks commissioner Margaret Hamburg to rectify the situation by promulgating a new policy that would restore prior employee and media freedoms to interact without Press Office supervision. Dickinson, who authored a commentary on FDA Webview the day before that predicted the agency’s growing culture of secrecy would defeat Obama Administration transparency ambitions, says in the petition that current policy violates both the First and the Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

 

The petition argues that the current media access policy abridges FDA employees’ legally limited First Amendment right of free speech by imposing an impermissible “prior restraint” on their voluntary communications with the news media, and that it abridges the news media’s free press rights “by effectively prohibiting their direct communication … except under supervision of the Press Office, such supervision having an inhibitory effect …”

 

The current policy, Dickinson’s petition says, also violates the Fifth Amendment’s “government taking” clause by impacting the timeliness of newsgathering and introducing publication delays or even not delivering requested information at all. “Information not delivered or delivered too late for publication is not merchantable news,” the petition claims.

 

Dickinson says the policy also violates Title 5, USC, the Administrative Procedures Act, by not being published for public information, notice and comment.