Corporate media political reporting has always been a clubby endeavor, but a recent reporting experience suggests that the insider culture in Washington, DC, is more insular than ever.
It’s often a challenge for independent media to get responses from Washington insider sources—especially on stories critical of powerful actors—but it’s become increasingly difficult even to pose the questions to those sources. Corporate news sources now issue press releases without bothering to include any information about who to contact with follow-up questions, as if the source is handing the truth down from on high.
When I first encountered this phenomenon after returning to journalism three years ago, I assumed it was a function of the laziness and/or incompetence of individual PR hacks. In my previous life, I had written a few dozen press releases, and “who’s the contact person?” was always a key question to answer in planning media outreach. But today, a failure to offer contact information increasingly appears to be a deliberate strategy to stymie journalistic inquiry.
‘No Surprises’ unsurprising fiasco
Last November, my healthcare politics online newsletter, Healing and Stealing (11/7/25), published an investigation of a national coalition of health insurers and other big businesses. The Coalition Against Surprise Medical Billing includes major business lobbying trade associations like the National Retail Federation, National Restaurant Association, National Association of Manufacturers and the health insurance industry trade group AHIP. Through those associations and business/labor health policy alliances, most of the largest employers in the US and many major labor unions are part of the Coalition, in alliance with the health insurance companies that sell them health plans for their employees.
The Coalition lobbied for passage of the No Surprises Act. The law, passed in December 2020 and signed by President Donald Trump, limits the amount that patients have to pay out of pocket when they unknowingly see a doctor or use another service that is not covered in their health insurance plan’s network. The law also set up a new arbitration system to resolve disputes—between employers and insurers on one side, and hospitals, labs, doctors’ offices and ambulance companies on the other—over the rest of the bills.
Hellbound and Down 