Prerelease access to official statistics is not consistent with professional ethics

摘要

Arguments for prerelease access recall the ‘public interest’, but the interests served are, at the end of the day, not the ones of the public. Prerelease access is inconsistent with first principles of statistical ethics: impartiality, objectivity, independence. It is actually a potent enabling condition for undermining the integrity of official statistics and undercutting the public’s trust in these statistics. It serves as a vehicle for unfair gains – whether political, economic, or career. Prerelease access is not necessary either for policy conduct or for the public’s understanding of the statistics; there are appropriate substitutes. In this paper we discuss in some detail arguments for and against prerelease access to official statistics by the government and/or the press. We recommend complete elimination of prerelease access by both the government in power and members of the press. We also advocate that contradictions in codified principles regarding prerelease access under the principle of impartiality must also be addressed: there should be no place there for ‘double think’.