There’s a saying in journalism that the only dumb question is one not asked. I don’t normally do media criticism but I want help non-journalists understand why a potentially good scoop by the Washington Free Beacon could have been made better with an extra question asked…..
The reporter got an on-the-record statement from an agency spox that danced around the question of whether grants would be given for safe smoking kits that include crack pipes. The next logical step was to specifically ask if pipes were included….
The flack might have come back with a “yes.” Big story! Or maybe, when the flack checked with legal, the agency staff would have said, holy shit, the WFB is asking about pipes and they would have said no. Not quite as good a story but the logical follow-up question would be…
What’s the point of a safe smoking kit without pipes? I quote the Drug Policy Initiative as saying they expected pipes to be funded, so the story could have been about $ spent on a nonsensical policy. But instead the WFB assumed the kits included pipes…
Not necessarily a bad assumption, for reasons noted above. But they didn’t have that fact cold and made the spox comment appear much more definitive. That gave the administration a chance to claim that was never the policy and attack the reporting…
With one more question, the WFB might have nailed the administration. Now the Biden folks have some plausible deniability even though, as I said, a smoking kit without glass stems doesn’t make much sense and harm-reduction advocates say it's a reversal....
The WFB and HHS shared the email exchanges with me and I detail the reporting process in this report, with both sides giving their version. Readers can judge for themselves. washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/…
Update: Sarah Lovenheim, top HHS spox, sent this statement: “The Biden-Harris Administration has never authorized the use of federal funding for smoke pipes and will not in the future. We have not yet approved any harm reduction grants and no money for the program has gone out.”
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