Journalist files FOIA Request for Obama’s Game of Thrones Screeners
By Ani Bundel
Some people cannot handle the concept of waiting seven more days for Game of Thrones Season 6 to return.
Seriously, we’re down to hours at this point–180 to be precise, until Season 6 arrives back on all of our TVs. And that goes for everyone. With no screeners, there are only an elite few who have already seen the first episode (at the LA Premiere.) Only one man has seen beyond that, and that President Obama. As we reported earlier this week, Benioff and Weiss confirmed that the leader of the free world is the only person who got advanced copies.
Apparently that’s not sitting well with one journalist, who thinks that if the president of the US can have screeners, then he should release them to the public. (This wouldn’t be the same journalist who was so foolish as to actually leak the screeners last year and cause the lock down would it?) Since Obama has the screeners, they’ve done the principled thing, and filed a Freedom Of Information Act request in order to force said screeners to be released.
The journalist in question is Vanessa Golembewski of Refinery29. She’s posted an article defending her actions, even as she admits that this is really rather pushing the boundaries that the law was intended to protect.
I know it’s a stretch. Firstly, I’m not entirely sure where the Game of Thrones screeners fall in the grey area that is personal property of a government figure. Secondly, there’s a bunch of red tape around the kinds of things you can request in a FOIA. Okay, fine. There are just nine exemptions — and all of them seem like really fair calls. For example, it’s off limits if the information in question would threaten our national security. I felt confident that even with these rules, TV episodes were still fair game.
The article is an interesting lesson on how to file an FOIA request for anyone who is so inclined, and goes on to make fun of our government bureaucracy, as one does when one is confronted with paperwork in triplicate.
As for if she will be successful? With only seven days to go before the premiere, the answer is “highly doubtful.” But she’s got how–after all, since Obama has found time to go do podcasts and so forth, perhaps he might be interested in writing a couple of recaps, or vlogging his reactions for us all.