White House Orders Embargoed NASA Budget Briefing Canceled
Keith’s note: There was supposed to be an embargoed press briefing on the FY 2013 budget at NASA HQ today at 2:00 pm EST. That has now been cancelled. I do not know who cancelled it but Brian Berger at Space News is reporting that this was done on orders from the White House – and that’s a good enough source for me. I was not planning on attending this event (I have in the past) since these things tend to be high level, no policy questions allowed, no quotes, and you have to decide between listening to the off the record briefer or furiously write down the budget numbers they flash on a screen (no handouts). Of course, if you attend you are then under an embargo until the budget is released on Monday – and I honor embargoes when I agree to be under them. But now the White House has clamped down on this so its a moot point. That said, I really do appreciate NASA PAO for taking the time to try and do this and for inviting me and others.
The President makes an $850M request for commercial crew programs, the same request that was quashed by Congress, including Bill Nelson, last year. Mr. Nelson instead supported billions for sending a few people back to the moon on giant expendable rockets. Anyone else remember Apollo 12? By then the public was bored. We, the space advocate community, need to decide whether human spaceflight should be spectacular or sustainable.
My guess: Based on experience, they trust the aerospace media not to leak the contents of embargoed briefings, but some of those trusted people may ask outsiders for reaction for their stories, and those outsiders may not understand or simply ignore the strictures. Thus we had stories a couple of days ago about the cuts to the Planetary program, since scientists, like anyone else whose livelihood doesn’t depend on keeping secret something that will become public in a week’s time or less, talk to other people.
You clearly have no idea how the professional media works. When we go to an embargoed briefing we agree to the embargo. We do not discuss it – asking someone to react to that material would be breaking the embargo. If we break the embargo we never get invited back. Very self-regulatory. Whatever is out in the news right now was not the result of any embargoed media briefing since there was none. If other people are talking about information from inside the agency then that has nothing to do with breaking a media embargo – again because the embargoed media briefing was never held in the first place.
Sorry, Keith, but my comments were based on personal experience. If they differ from yours, my apologies for making it appear I thought they were universal.