According to a buried article in the Washington Post on Wednesday:
The Washington office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- the agency responsible for protecting endangered salmon -- has instructed its representatives and scientists in the West to route media questions about salmon back to headquarters. Only three people in the entire agency, all of them political appointees, are now authorized to speak of salmon, according to a NOAA employee who has been silenced on the fish
(emphasis added)
Is it possible to make stuff like this up?
"The order was issued the day after an article appeared last month in The Washington Post quoting federal technocrats making positive statements about two recent decisions -- one by a federal judge, the other by federal scientists -- that challenged previous Bush administration policy about protecting salmon in the troubled Klamath River, which flows out of Oregon into California," the Post
reports.
This is part of a larger pattern by the Bush Administration, to control information, control the flow of information, and control what information is acquired.
I cover this here