Let’s just get this on the record — there is no such thing as “off the record” anymore.
Should anyone online have doubted this fact, let this week’s tempest over U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama’s recent comments eliminate that doubt.
A writer for the Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” project, edited by my USC colleague Marc Cooper, reported comments by Sen. Obama at a gathering with supporter where journalists supposedly were not allowed.
Obama’s comments reflected a popular view among many progressives, notably articulated by author Thomas Frank four years ago in his book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” But rival Hillary Clinton and many right-leaning pundits attacked Obama as elitist for the remarks.
Let’s not get into that tempest, though. Instead, let’s remember this as one more example of how “citizen reporters” are spreading news from events and locations where professional reporters cannot, or do not, go.
With so many people publishing to blogs, Facebook pages and discussion boards, any professional news reporter who agrees to respect an “off the record” request at a meeting is committing an act of unilateral professional disarmament. I say… bag that. Don’t tell organizers that you’re a reporter. You’re a citizen, too. Get in, and report on what you see, just like any other citizen would.
In fact, the Obama incident provides a compelling argument why news reporters ought to contribute to political campaigns, to buy themselves access to more events that they can cover.
Of course, that strategy would work only until pols wise up and recognize that there is no way to enforce an “off the record” request anymore. Sure, the Obama campaign can bar HuffPo’s Mayhill Flower from future events. So what? Uncounted other potential “citizen journalists” will be waiting to take her place.
Smart PR reps know that they can’t make websites like http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks go away. Every year, some college seniors learn the hard way that potential employers can find those drunken campus party pictures and obscene wall posts on Facebook, too. Whatever you do, whatever you say, can end up on the Internet. Whether you try to keep it from traditional gatekeepers of massive market news or not.
“It’s like the Stasi,” another USC Annenberg colleague said to me yesterday.
Maybe. But I prefer a less harsh analogy, one also from the past. The Internet has returned us to life in a small frontier town, where everyone knows everyone else’s business.
Want to stay out of trouble? They watch what you say in public. Watch what you say around people you believe to be your friends. Instead of unleashing you id 24/7, communicate with intent instead.
That’s not a bad thing, really. It’s just different than what many people in Western industrial societies have grown used to, where people routinely live in anonymous isolation even in the midst of a crowded community. Maybe the Internet will lead us to act a bit more formal to each other in the future. Or maybe it will lead us in the opposite direction, where we deal with all this information about each other by ignoring it, in the way many people have learned to ignore public cursing, kissing and other displays that would have offended many more people a generation or two past.
What’s this mean for journalists, pro and amateur? As always, the best way to win readers, for the long term, is to put all this swirling information into smarter, sharper perspective than anyone else does.
On Obama, ignore the silly score-keeping that diminishes so much political coverage and write instead about the context surrounding what he said. (Ditto for other candidates.) Check out the tips on Wikileaks. Cut a kid a break for something stupid on Facebook, then teach your own kids, students and young colleagues how better to conduct themselves online.
There is no off or on the record anymore. It’s all gonna end up there. But people continue to long for a record that makes sense. Journalists, and sources, don’t get to pick what goes on the record anymore. But they still can help how people what on that record is worth paying attention to, and how to better understand it.
About Robert Niles
I completely agree.
Nothing should be off the record in regard to politicians and public figures. If you are running to be president of the free world, everything is game.
We are the media and we are watching.
I disagree.
Not everything is politics. If someone can’t tell me something off the record anymore, then I will be severely limited in my ability to tell a story. Off the record comments are useful for background, or knowing where to dig, or in understanding aspects a story that can’t yet be made public. If there’s “no such thing” as off the record anymore, then my trust factor just got shot to hell.
Maybe it’s different since the primary outlet for my work in the past was print, but I for one am glad to extend the self-restraint of “off the record” to people I contact, and will continue to do so. It’s a matter of my personal credibility.
People in the “good old days” did indeed know everyone else’s business and gossip about it — even when they *didn’t* really know their business, and only thought they did. Are reporters to turn themselves into nothing but gossipmongers? I say no. Now is a time to hold onto journalistic ethics all the more, not to loosen them.
Just because pseudo-journalists are out there in a free for all doesn’t mean that professionals ought to lower their standards.
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There’s an important distinction to be made here. I agree that citizen journalism and the internet means that there is no such thing as an “off-the-record” event, such as the Obama fundraiser. And I think that’s a good thing because closing such events to all or some reporters has always been a way to hide information and/or manipulate the press through selective access.
However, citizen journalism and the internet do not end the practice of a reporter and a source mutually agreeing that certain information will not be used or will not be attributed to the source. Such private transactions between two people are based on trust between the individuals involved as well as their mutual self-interest. There are plenty of pitfalls in such arrangements that journalists, sources, the public and the courts have wrestled with forever — the federal shield law debate is only the latest example of this — but there’s no reason to think that such individual reporter-source agreements will disappear.
What will be interesting is to see if and how “citizen” journalists adopt or adapt these practices. Journalistic practices are always evolving and adapting.
Guy Baehr, former daily newspaper reporter
There’s what should be, and what is.
Should there be “off the record” conversations and events? Maybe. Sure. Whatever.
But can someone be sure that his/her event, e-mail, post or conversation will be off the record if he/she says it is? No.
So what do thoughtful writers do about this? As I wrote in the last couple grafs, you try to put this information into a proper perspective. Write about what is accurate and relevant to your readers.
Maybe that charge leads you to ignore something that’s out there. Maybe you play it down, relative to how others are playing it. Or, maybe, you run with it, emphasize it or break it yourself.
The Internet is killing the convention of keeping information ‘off the record.’ There are just too many publishers and potential publishers out there to enforce many of those deals anymore. But the Internet does not need to kill off the concept of editorial judgment. That’s not a collective decision (as off the record is), but an individual one. You can always decide what you, as an individual writer, choose to put out there.
But, as an individual, you need to recognize that you are operating in a competitive environment where many other writers are operating under different conventions than have traditionally guided the news industry. How you choose to react to that is up to you, but you shouldn’t operate as if that competition is not there. Not if you want to beat it.
Why should professional journalists care what “citizen journalists” do anyway? It’s a question of credibility. A colleague of mine, interested in reading about developments in a particular current event, recently told me that when searching for new updates he completely ignores “blogs” and instead reads only articles from reputed professional sources. The “blogs” he considers to be sensationalist, usually one-sided, or in many cases poorly informed and highly opinionated – in short, completely unreliable. I expect he is not alone, in which case professional journalists ought to stand for what they believe in, and that means if maintaining “off the record” agreements with sources produces the best journalistic results then so be it. Don’t be swayed to give up your reputation and credibility just because the “bloggers” do.
I disagree. Your article focuses too much on one example, Obama’s Penn.-bashing. For a local reporter like me, who writes for a 7,000 circulation newspaper in a town of 40,000 residents, no one of going to find out what farmer so-and-so said or thinks unless I report on it. So if I keep a part of the interview off the record, it’s off the record.
-Amy Larson