Required reading.

AuthorLynch, Michael W.
PositionBureau of National Affairs

Why is the Bureau of National Affairs Washington's biggest media organization? Because for more than 70 years, it's covered the government's every move.

Ask most Americans which news organization is the most ubiquitous and influential in Washington, and they'll probably name The Washington Post or perhaps split the ticket with CNN. They'd be surprised to know that the news organization with the most reporters covering the daily machinations of the federal government is not the mighty Post, the hometown's dominant daily. Nor is it The New York Times, America's paper of record, which claims to gather all the news that's fit to print.

Washington's most omnipresent media organization is something called the Bureau of National Affairs. Unless you buy one of its products - which means you're most likely a lobbyist, health care executive, bureaucrat, human resource officer, labor lawyer, government affairs manager for a major corporation, or environmental compliance officer - you've probably never heard of BNA. But each day, this unsung company sends about 220 reporters into the halls of Congress and executive agencies, compared with about 60 each for the Post and Times. These BNA journalists, part of a worldwide staff of 1,657, fill some 200 high-priced publications with thousands of pages of "just the facts" copy, all chronicling, in great detail, what federal, state, and international bureaucracies are up to.

"No sir, we are not a part of the federal government," is the standard BNA response to the inevitable question. The company is, rather, a facts funnel for government information on policies that affect business. Its writers know, as rookie reporter John Stewart was told 60 years ago, that "nobody is going to read what you write because he wants to. He's reading it because he has to. All he wants is facts." (The advice worked well for Stewart, who served as president and CEO from 1964-79 before moving up to chairman of the board until he retired in 1993.)

With a few exceptions - education policy, welfare issues that don't relate to labor or taxes, and foreign policy that isn't trade-related - if policy is being made, BNA is telling its subscribers about it. "They are a journal of record for the regulatory apparatus," says C. Boyden Gray, who served as counsel to regulatory task forces in the Reagan and Bush administrations. (Gray is a trustee of the Reason Foundation, REASON's parent organization.) He reads BNA's Daily Environment Report every day ($2,998 a year for print, around $2,000 for Web or e-mail delivery). "The business pages used to cover this more 20 years ago," says Gray. "Then it got to be too much, so they basically don't cover it at all any more."

As Gray suggests, the regulatory state's growth has been good for BNA. In the company's history and publications, we can see not only the patterns of that expansion but a disturbing fact about ubiquitous regulation: Simply keeping up with what the law requires has become so burdensome that tracking government actions can employ hundreds of reporters updating thousands of regulatory specialists. BNA's success, while an impressive business story, suggests the costs of regulation, most of which are never measured. The company's sales, only the tip of this iceberg, were $269 million last year.

The BNA story also suggests a rarely acknowledged interest group calculus: All those reporters and readers have become, sometimes despite their best intentions, implicit supporters of the regulatory state. "Well," chuckles Michael Maibach, Intel's Washington-based vice president for government affairs, "I think everyone thinks government could do a little bit less, but it's part of our job to keep track of what the government is doing, and you know, we're as happy as we can be. We happen to like these jobs." All that brainpower - of BNA's writers and editors, and of its subscribers - is also a regulatory cost, diverted from more productive pursuits.

Growing Gains

BNA began in 1929 with The United States Daily, which founder David Lawrence envisioned as a national paper of record, publishing the texts of laws, regulations, and court decisions. The idea failed. Subscriptions peaked at only 100,000, too few to support a conventional publication. A few years later on a train trip to New York, however, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs offered Lawrence some valuable advice: There just aren't enough people who need daily information with that level of detail to...

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