The tributes for President Gerald R. Ford have filled the newspapers and the airwaves for the past days. There has been much good reporting on how America had been roiled by Watergate and the war in Vietnam. In that fractious time President Ford moved quickly to grant a pardon to President Nixon and we were reminded how Americans’ anger rose again.

The reporting has demonstrated that journalism, at its best, situates and contextualizes complicated events and helps the audience remember and re-evaluate our collective experience.

But I was surprised to read in the Washington Post that Ford had given a secret interview to Bob Woodward two years ago. In that interview, Ford expressed his doubts about the war in Iraq. He stated it had been a serious error.

The interview was kept secret because the reporter was asked not to publish the story until Ford had died. Woodward agreed.

Quoted in the trade publication, Editor & Publisher, Woodward wrote that he initially interviewed Ford for a possible book, but “agreed to embargo the former president's comments until after his death.”

The Post was not the only publication to agree to an embargo.

Newsweek magazine interviewed Ford three years ago in which the former president stated that he opposed the neo-conservative influence that has pushed the Republican Party toward the hard right.

Newsweek also agreed to an embargo and promised Ford that his criticisms would not be printed until after his death.

The question is whether agreeing to an embargo was ethical, especially when it concerned matters of considerable interest and importance to the country.

I’ve never been a fan of news embargoes and this event only confirms my thinking.

Embargoes can be useful in some cases. Political or economic reporters who cover budgets respect the limitation. Embargoes are supposed to give journalists time to digest complicated subjects without fear of being scooped.

Budget embargos are also necessary to make sure that unscrupulous people don’t manipulate stock portfolios in anticipation of changes to tax laws.

Governments also frequently invoke the “thirty year rule” when it comes to releasing policy documents to the scrutiny of historians and presumably at a time when journalists will have less interest in the subjects.

And science and medical reporters are often given advance copies about scientific breakthroughs from scholarly journals with the proviso that the story will be embargoed. Reporters rarely go against this restriction.

But what is the real value to the public of agreeing to the embargo?

In my opinion, not very much.

Vincent Kieran, a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education published a study which was released in August 2006 on whether embargoes of scientific research actually help journalists. Click here for a summary of Kieran’s study. [1] Kieran surveyed 25 daily U.S. newspapers and spoke to dozens of reporters to examine the concept of the embargo and how it frames our understanding of news about science.

Kiernan concluded this system encourages "pack journalism" by fostering an unhealthy resistance to journalistic competition. The result, says Kieran, is the uncritical reporting of science and medical news according to the dictates of a few key sources.

In my experience, embargoes have the same impact in non-science matters, especially in political reporting. Journalists often tend to value the idea of the embargo because it conveys the illusion of access to power and inside information to which only they, these chosen journalists, may be in on. In fact, the embargo is much more useful to the person or the organization who demands the embargo because it allows the person demanding the embargo to control the flow of information. It flatters the journalist while ignoring the public’s right to know.

I think journalists should ignore embargoes unless there is a compelling public reason for doing so. When I have suggested this, journalists usually complain that they might lose a source if they refuse to honor an embargo. Or worse, they fear that they might be blacklisted if they ever broke an embargo. I think these fears are overblown because the embargo-er needs the journalists more than the reverse.

The culture of the embargo tends to overlook the impact of the blogosphere. We now live in a time when bloggers and the internet make these quiet little agreements moot. The question should always be asked whether the public interest might be served in knowing this information. If so, then it can be argued that the embargo should be ignored.

President Ford’s criticisms of the war in Iraq and of his own Republican Party may or may not have had an impact in Washington had his opinions been reported earlier. But now we will never know. And in their rush to pay tribute to a decent man, some journalists have overlooked whether the public also should have been brought into the equation.

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