The Washington Post came under fire for allegedly breaking the embargo of a report by the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS that reduced the estimated size of the global HIV epidemic.

Slate media critic Jack Schafer says bully for the Post:*

* Slate and the W-P have the same parent company, a fact acknowledged in Schafer's column.

What the hell is a press embargo, you might ask, and why the hell should I care?

Scientific journals, governmental organizations, and even book publishers give journalists an embargoed sneak peak at soon-to-be-published information in return for a promise that the journalists will hold their stories until after an agreed-upon date. In theory, embargoes level the playing field, allowing reporters to take care and time to get complicated stories absolutely right without fear that somebody will beat them.

Critics of embargoes—of which I am one—prefer to obsess over the down side. Science embargoes, writes Vincent Kiernan in his 2006 book Embargoed Science, discourage press competition, bestow unwarranted deference upon authority, encourage the passivity and reactiveness of pack journalism, and, in the case of science, steers reporters away from aggressively covering science as an institution. He dismisses as oversold the claim that embargoes increase news accuracy, citing the many complicated fields in which competing journalists report complex breaking news accurately.

The journalists who like embargoes—not all do, of course—like them because they provide a dependable news schedule for reporters, Kiernan writes. Embargoes take the stress out of reporting and give all reporters who participate a solid "news peg" for their pieces. Embargoes make journalists adjuncts of the embargoee's publicity machine, he writes. For all the reasons Kiernan cites, I'd add that embargoes dangerously cartelize the relationship between reporters and sources, and, at worst, reporters begin to treat sources as their clients, not their readers. ...