Off the record and off the campaign staff
An impressive young woman named Samantha Power resigned as the foreign policy advisor for Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign last week after a reporter in a Scottish newspaper quoted her as calling fellow Democratic candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, “a monster.”
Power said the comment was “off-the-record,” which actually is information the reporter included in the story in question.
Though new to being a member of a national campaign staff, Power is no naïve school girl tricked by a mean or irresponsible reporter. She’s a member of the faculty of John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. This is a highly intelligent, highly credentialed woman.
She’s also human and among the many, many people who are confused by the term “off-the-record” as it applies to journalistic practices.
As much as many people, even many journalists, might think the reporter in this case skewered Power by writing about her comments, as presented in the story above, the reporter might not have been “nice” to power, but no journalistic rules were violated.
Power missed two important points in making “off-the-record” comments.
(1) The person being interviewed must make that “off-the-record” plea BEFORE he or she makes the questionable statement and
(2) The reporter must AGREE that they are willing to listen to what the interview subject is saying under those circumstances.
It’s a tricky issue for both the person being interviewed and the reporter. A reporter might agree to the “off-the-record” discussion – then find out additional facts from another source. Unless that reporter can get the facts that led him or her to that discovery – they are stuck in reporting limbo, protecting their agreed source in spite of the fact that the range and or content of the story might have been bigger than they anticipated.
Reporters at The Enterprise and many other credible newspapers are discouraged from agreeing to “off-the-record” comments for that reason. It sometimes creates such a tangled web of intrigue it makes more sense to simply pursue on-the-record comments from other sources instead. We can find ourselves, almost literally, plugging our ears and humming, to discourage people from telling us things we are not willing to hear, “off-the-record.”
Basically, just as we don’t allow letter writers on our opinions page to submit comments anonymously, we expect people to “own” their words. If they aren’t willing to tell us things on the record, we probably don’t want to hear them.
To Power’s credit, she HAS, not only resigned from Obama’s campaign, but issued an apology as well. A You Tube video version even shows her noting that her comments were hurtful and “very, very stupid.”
At the very least, she’s learned an important journalistic, and political, lesson in how things work.
Power said the comment was “off-the-record,” which actually is information the reporter included in the story in question.
Though new to being a member of a national campaign staff, Power is no naïve school girl tricked by a mean or irresponsible reporter. She’s a member of the faculty of John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. This is a highly intelligent, highly credentialed woman.
She’s also human and among the many, many people who are confused by the term “off-the-record” as it applies to journalistic practices.
As much as many people, even many journalists, might think the reporter in this case skewered Power by writing about her comments, as presented in the story above, the reporter might not have been “nice” to power, but no journalistic rules were violated.
Power missed two important points in making “off-the-record” comments.
(1) The person being interviewed must make that “off-the-record” plea BEFORE he or she makes the questionable statement and
(2) The reporter must AGREE that they are willing to listen to what the interview subject is saying under those circumstances.
It’s a tricky issue for both the person being interviewed and the reporter. A reporter might agree to the “off-the-record” discussion – then find out additional facts from another source. Unless that reporter can get the facts that led him or her to that discovery – they are stuck in reporting limbo, protecting their agreed source in spite of the fact that the range and or content of the story might have been bigger than they anticipated.
Reporters at The Enterprise and many other credible newspapers are discouraged from agreeing to “off-the-record” comments for that reason. It sometimes creates such a tangled web of intrigue it makes more sense to simply pursue on-the-record comments from other sources instead. We can find ourselves, almost literally, plugging our ears and humming, to discourage people from telling us things we are not willing to hear, “off-the-record.”
Basically, just as we don’t allow letter writers on our opinions page to submit comments anonymously, we expect people to “own” their words. If they aren’t willing to tell us things on the record, we probably don’t want to hear them.
To Power’s credit, she HAS, not only resigned from Obama’s campaign, but issued an apology as well. A You Tube video version even shows her noting that her comments were hurtful and “very, very stupid.”
At the very least, she’s learned an important journalistic, and political, lesson in how things work.
posted by Sheila Friedeck at 3:44 PM
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