How will USDA decision on media access affect farmers?

There are a handful of tenets to good journalism: Always seek the truth. Never proclaim something as true without corroboration from multiple sources. Serve readers first. Keep yourself, the journalist, out of the story. That last one has unfortunately become impossible for us at DTN in relation to the July 11 announcement that USDA will end the century-old process of media access to its report.To be clear, we at DTN have a dog in this fight. This is not a story we can cover with neutrality, because it affects our reporting, the news we can supply customers and readers, and our business.But that's not why we'll continue to cover it. We're making a pretty big deal out of this issue because we think it puts farmers, elevator operators, and rural citizens in general, at a huge disadvantage in the marketplace. The agency is adamant that forcing everyone to download commodity report data from its website puts all users on even footing. But as Clayton so deftly points out, this is the same agency that for some time has been saying the lack of reliable broadband access in farm country is the greatest hurdle for rural economic development.