I'm totally sucked into the behind the scenes series on Newsweek. A group of reporters were given "exclusive behind-the-scenes" access to the Obama and McCain campaigns "on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day."
POHS
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Newsweek
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6 comments:
I read these for hours on Post-election Days 1, 2, and 3. They definitely save the best for last. I do have to say, though, that I think it's a little bit criminal for the press to agree to hold back information that is potentially incredibly important to an election until after the election.
The best example of that is Carl Cameron's work on Fox, where he said that he had agreed to keep off the record until after the election the fact that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country and couldn't name the signatories to NAFTA. To which I respond: "Fine. Don't quote them. But by god, have Sean Hannity take a break from his cunnilingus long enough to ask her if she's ever heard of Canada and Mexico."
Anything less is a complete abrogation of the role of the Fourth Estate.
JEK
This is a very interesting question and I completely agree with you. But I must confess, the opposite viewpoint is the one that first occurred to me: How amazing that the campaigns allowed themselves to be recorded for posterity, both the good and the bad.
The ethics here are tricky. Therapists must keep their client's info in confidence unless they pose a threat to themselves or others. Is Sarah Palin as VP a threat? Perhaps. But unless she was planning to commit a crime, these reporters should keep their word not to publish until after the election. These anecdotes and tid-bits would otherwise never have been recorded.
I only just started reading the article, but I already can't wait for the arrival of Sarah Palin!
I just have to point out the irony of the McCain campaign working as hard as it can to keep the public from knowing too much about Palin, while she publicly questions how much Americans know about Obama.
Tangentially, I remember reading that Bill Clinton was very keen on giving historians access to his presidency. I fact, if I remember correctly, he even had an official Presidential Historian while in office. That may be respect for history or ego. Quite the opposite to Bush's level of secrecy.
Those articles are indeed incredibly good. Is newsweek secretly a really awesome magazine? I had previously vaguely associated it with dentists' offices and cover articles on dubious lifestyle trends.
As for the questions regarding the role of the press, it recalls the rise of pentagonal "embedding" circa 2003. It is a little uncomfortable, but I guess I'm OK with the reporters keeping their contractual obligations vis a vis on/off record stuff. I would be angry if an obama-embedded fox reporter broke his word in order to reveal some Biden gaffe.
I guess my point is not that they should have reported what they were told was off the record. My journalism career was just long enough to instill in me the belief that a source should be honored and an off the record remark kept that way no matter what (this, btw, fueled many a bileful tirade when Samantha Power was brought down by someone with a less strict view.)
My point is that if you know something from an off the record conversation, you have an obligation not the reveal the source of that knowledge, but you DO have an obligation to reveal what you know.
So you don't get on camera and say, "sources inside the McCain camp say that Sarah Palin's wardrobe assistants are a necessary expense because otherwise she often puts her underwear on on the outside of her clothes." But you do ask probing questions on the record, to expose what you learned off the record. You do take the knowledge that the vice presidential candidate is manifestly unsuitable for the job, and expose that. You don't just pretend you didn't know it. You're not a therapist...your job is not to keep the counsel of people in power.
I agree with POHS that the campaigns agreeing to do give this level of access on the bond of a word is pretty amazing...but I wonder if the same articles would have been written the same way if the outcome had been different. Reading these, Obama is cast as the victor from the outset.
Hmmm... In regular jouralism I imagine that would be exactly how an off the record source would be used. Like a lawyer with evidence that can't be used in court, asking questions to drive the witness to reveal what the lawyer already knows but can't say himself.
But in this case, I am imagining the embedded reporters to be completely embedded for the entire campaign, writing no articles and conducting no on camera interviews. Not even talking to their co-workers back at the newsroom. So, it's not just that these guys hear occasional off-the-record comments, but rather they "hang out" with the campaigns after the regular reporters leave. So, they don't have any opportunities to hint at what they know. I don't know if that's how it works, but that's how I was imagining it.
If they are publishing articles every day, I imagine it would be very difficult for them to keep track of what they officially saw/heard and what they didn't, particularly if the candidate you're following has a behind-closed-doors temper tantrum every day. But I know journalists deal with this every day.
And, yes, I've only read chapter one, but the authors clearly already know who wins (omniscient narrator) and are from the beginning explaining to the reader why. I guess it IS called "How he Did It." But perhaps a more compelling editorial choice would be to have written it as the campaign went along without the authors knowing the outcome.
Mark Penn particularly sounds awful:
The story, while byzantine, was a perfect microcosm of the campaign to come: a Hollywood mogul uses a famous columnist to revive old rumors of the candidate's husband's infidelities; the candidate's campaign panics and ends up aggravating the problem; the campaign's chief strategist (Mark Penn) washes his hands of the whole situation, and when the candidate tells him to "fix it" he sees an opportunity to undermine two other top staffers—without fixing anything.
POHS, your points are excellent ones, and I totally agree with them. What the Newsweek team did really does seem like an embed, and they're very open about that -- they put in a second team of reporters who were not going to do any of the day-to-day reporting, with an understanding they would write nothing until the end of it all. I think that's totally kosher...though again, it seems a little bit convenient that the narrative so clearly charts the rise of Obama and the fall of his rivals so starkly. But maybe that's why he won -- his campaign just was that much better. This is hardly a narrative arc I disagree with. I savored these articles.
What I have more of a problem with is the reporters who were reporting daily about the campaign now coming out and saying, "we knew Palin was crazy from the get-go," despite the fact that they treated her candidacy as totally legitimate during the election. That seems like lying, to me.
Remember that the pollster the Clintons used before Mark Penn was Dick Morris. So they've improved a lot, though talk about damning with faint praise...
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