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Follow-up on the wire services

Enviado 10 de febrero de 2006 - 16:07 por Jeremy Bigwood
First I would like to thank the federal government contracts specialist Stephen Peacock for his commentary.

Since my last post (above) I have contacted the spokespeople for Reuters and AP and sent them the following questions relating to their respective contracts with the NSA:

  1. How large is your contract with NSA?
  2. How big is the NSA contract in comparison with your U.S. newspaper and media contracts?”
  3. Do you have similar contracts with other U.S. government agencies?
  4. Do you have contracts with other governments?
  5. When did this contract start?
  6. What does this contract supply?
  7. Does the NSA ever ask your company to do “special stories” of work on any subjects?
  8. Does the NSA ever recommend that certain people get hired or promoted?
And to Reuters, based on Bill Conroy's commentary (above), I added:
9. Is NSA a “Reuters partner”?

The response to these detailed questions was curt. "We don't talk about contracts," said Jack Stokes, the spokesperson for AP Corporate Communications.  Samantha Topping, Reuter's Director of Media Relations was no more forthcoming, stating: "I can't offer any information about our clients. We don't talk about our clients." When I tried to obtain more information, she responded "No comment".

A follow-up e-mail from AP arrived later: “AP Digital sells a variety of news packages to corporate and government intranet clients in the United States for internal informational use only. Such clients are prohibited from redistributing AP news stories externally. See details on the front page of our corporate Internet site under "Buy AP News" or go directly to http://www.apdigitalnews.com/about.html.”

Of the eight questions above, only the question regarding similar contracts with other government agencies was answered, and then only by AP. We can take this answer as a confirmation that the AP has contracts with other government agencies besides the NSA.

The lack of transparency in these responses is stunning. If we were to reverse the roles and instead it was wire service journalists who were on the receiving end of such short and opaque responses, these would be undoubtedly viewed with great suspicion.  Clearly, Reuters and AP should have come clean and answered at least some of the questions, especially with regard to any influence these contracts may have had on the behavior of their wire services. To have done otherwise only keeps us all wondering exactly what is the relationship between NSA and these wire services.

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