Tag Associated Press

After that first step it’s pretty much all downhill the rest of the way

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

It seems I could not have been any more wrong about change being slow: here are more positive developments resulting from last week’s “quote approval” story from the New York Times (thanks to Jim Romenesko for the tips this morning).

After the Associated Press stood up for itself, and on the heels of McClatchy and the National Journal announcing they would not permit their reporters to give interview subjects the right to approve direct quotations for publication, the editor of the American Journalism Review has stepped up to say what most good journalists have been thinking: everyone must agree to just say no.  The sure way to stop government and campaign officials from, in essence, writing the stories about themselves that you and I read is for journalists to stop agreeing to this “pernicious practice.”

The editors at Bloomberg have made it as clear as can be—it’s one thing to negotiate to move an off-the-record quote on the record, but

What isn’t fine is sending quotes to the source or a press office for their revision or rewriting. In such a case, you would no longer know who is actually uttering/writing the words, and it is no longer a negotiation but a surrender of editorial control.

OK then, any other journalists out there still good with surrendering their editorial control?  Let’s see a show of hands…

A journey of a thousand miles begins with…

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

“Change is sure slow” I wrote last week; I was wrong, and couldn’t be more pleased about it.

I wrote that in a post based on a New York Times story about the growing practice of government and campaign officials demanding pre-publication approval of any direct quotes attributed to them in published news stories.  The big news media outlets that sheepishly admitted to giving “quote approval” to the subjects of their stories reacted as though they were helpless infants: if they refused they would lose access to the sources and not have the story at all…there was nothing they could do.

Nothing, except stand up to the bullies.  And prove the value of reporting a story, of shining the light of publicity on a corrupt practice.

The day after the Times story ran the Associated Press raised its hand to say it did not permit quote approval.  Soon after that Dan Rather and others weighed in; today it’s McClatchy and the National Journal stepping up to reclaim some of journalism’s tarnished heritage.  I feel confident this growing cascade of recognition of who journalists really work for isn’t going to dry up with the testimony of these disciples.  (Well done, Jeremy Peters and the Times.)

The point was true last week and remains true today: “No news publication can cede the responsibility to write its own story as its writers and editors see fit; to give up that authority to the people who are the subjects of the story is to erase any reason for you or me to believe anything they print.”  If more of them are coming around to the point of view that there is something they can do, that they can stand up to the bully, it’s just sad that they had to be embarrassed into doing the right thing.

The powers that be control the message—even more than you know

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Here is another depressing argument that the reality you and I inhabit, and feel comfortable most days saying we have some control over, has been sanitized for our protection.

The New York Times reports that “quote approval” is a common practice with the Obama and Romney campaigns, but also among most of the government bureaucracy.  Campaign or government officials agree to an interview with the proviso that they get pre-publication approval as to “what statements can be quoted and attributed by name.”

The chutzpah is galling, yes?  But here’s the worst part: the reporters agree to the condition!

It’s nothing new for politicians to go to extraordinary lengths to manage the impressions we get of them, and that’s not all bad: I’d rather have leaders who take time to consider what they’re doing and how their actions will be perceived than leaders who don’t take a moment to think about alternative courses of action and their potential outcomes.  And remember, there is no requirement anywhere that any politician or candidate for office need ever consent to be interviewed; that’s just the way, historically, that they have communicated with the people who put them in power.  They’re free to ask for any condition at all in return for an interview.

But, the role of the journalist in our system is to report—to dig, to uncover, to reason, to relate, to provide context—so the rest of us can hold leaders to account for the actions that they do take.  It’s not the job of the journalist to help the leaders fabricate a version of reality that puts them in a more positive light, and letting them clean up their quotes is doing just that.  (This system doesn’t work for an interview that is broadcast live on television or radio or the Web…yea, TV and radio.)

The politicians themselves betray a little self-consciousness on the issue—“The Obama campaign declined to make Mr. Plouffe or Mr. Messina available to explain their media practices. ‘We are not putting anyone on the record for this story,’ said Katie Hogan, an Obama spokeswoman, without a hint of irony.”—and the Times story says reporters “grudgingly agree” to this restriction.

I would argue that they should not agree at all.  Giving in to the bully is not the way to get him to stop stealing your lunch money.

Politicians should have the fortitude to stand by whatever they say when they agree to an on-the-record interview, whether it’s broadcast on television or reported in a printed publication, and I’m disappointed to learn about some of those who demand the final rewrite as if they were negotiating a movie deal.  But journalists mustuphold a higher standard, and that means no more cooperating with the cover-up.  Today’s story in the Times is a good start, because now the rest of us have a better idea of what’s going on.  Shining a light on this stupid practice is the first step toward bringing it to an end.

I’d love to see a story that informed me “candidate so-and-so would only agree to an interview if The Daily Disappointment gave him authority to decide which quotes would be included in the story.”  No news publication can cede the responsibility to write its own story as its writers and editors see fit; to give up that authority to the people who are the subjects of the story is to erase any reason for you or me to believe anything they print.

The author and critic Louis Kronenberger wrote that “The trouble with us in America isn’t that the poetry of life has been turned to prose, but that it has been turned to advertising copy.”  He wrote that in 1954…change is sure slow.

→UPDATE 7/17:  Turns out that not all the reporters give “quote approval”–congratulations, Associated Press!

Rhetoric doesn’t match the facts, and Roberts may not be a traitor to conservatism after all

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A follow-up on Thursday’s Supreme Court Obamacare ruling:

The campaign for president hasn’t taken a time out since the court issued its ruling on the health care insurance reform last week; Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are all over it, but it turns out they’re getting a good bit of it wrong—both of them.  Check out the AP fact checker on the rhetoric since last Thursday: the law does not guarantee everyone can keep the insurance they have now indefinitely, 20 million people losing their insurance is a worst-case scenario estimate, there’s no evidence the law will add trillions to the budget deficit or raise taxes on the American people by half a trillion dollars, and very few of us should be counting on rebate checks from our insurance companies.

A healthy portion of the American people had some level of surprise or disgust at the action of Chief Justice John Roberts in this case: surprise that he found the law was constitutional, disgust at his seeming abandonment of conservative principles to come up with a way to find that the law was constitutional.  Today, CBS News quotes sources inside the court who say Roberts changed his mind on this ruling and worked to find a way to save the law, which angered his conservative colleagues.  Meanwhile, two more top conservative columnists, George Will and Charles Krauthammer, have joined the ranks of those who see a silver lining in the ruling: Roberts found a way to strike a blow for limited government while at the same time protect the integrity of the court itself!

Will:

If the mandate had been upheld under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court would have decisively construed this clause so permissively as to give Congress an essentially unlimited police power — the power to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior for whatever Congress deems a public benefit. Instead, the court rejected the Obama administration’s Commerce Clause doctrine. The court remains clearly committed to this previous holding: “Under our written Constitution . . . the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.”

Krauthammer:

More recently, however, few decisions have occasioned more bitterness and rancor than Bush v. Gore, a 5 to 4 decision split along ideological lines. It was seen by many (principally, of course, on the left) as a political act disguised as jurisprudence and designed to alter the course of the single most consequential political act of a democracy — the election of a president.

Whatever one thinks of the substance of Bush v. Gore, it did affect the reputation of the court. Roberts seems determined that there be no recurrence with Obamacare. Hence his straining in his Obamacare ruling to avoid a similar result — a 5 to 4 decision split along ideological lines that might be perceived as partisan and political.

Last week I said that it would have been unfortunate for the law to be rejected by a single vote, in what would have amounted to a “party line” vote.  Will and Krauthammer and others think the chief justice of the United States was thinking the same as me…although he was thinking it sooner, I’m sure, and with much greater legal clarity.  But still, he was on the right track…

The surest sign of the season: the return of the War on Christmas on Fox News Channel

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Those first few strands of garland on the shopping center signpost the week before Halloween could be innocent enough, and the early signs that the local nursery is saving space for a lot of trees can be misleading.  But there’s only one explanation for the sudden glut of reports of controversy over “holiday” trees at the statehouse and proposed changes to the lyrics of Christmas carols: Fox News Channel has cranked up its reports on the War on Christmas.  And I do mean crank.

Jason Linkins notes that FNC is reporting a major victory on behalf of Christmas in this on-going clash, a phantom battle that is high high high on the list of the stupidest things ever to be the cause of wasted breath.  It’s another asinine cry for attention from a pampered majority of Americans who inexplicably feel threatened by any attempt by government or business to recognize that there are Americans with other beliefs that deserve respect, too.

For most mainstream Christians, the Yuletide season is one in which enormous accommodations are made to those who practice the Christian faith. You get time off from work, and schools get out so your kids can visit family, and on every block, there is an illuminated reminder that Christmas has arrived. You’ve probably noticed that this began about mid-October.

No holiday is as well accommodated in America as Christmas. It is perhaps one of the best celebrated religious holidays in the history of mankind.

Yet these people are peeved because some choose to wish others “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” even if only for crassly commercial reasons.

…the continuing use of the term “war on Christmas” to describe the reaction of people who do not receive full validation of their religious beliefs from cashiers 100 percent of the time is still a grievous insult to people around the world who are legitimately persecuted for expressing their religious faith, and who look to the way religious freedom is accommodated in America with envy.

And well they should, for they recognize that the Europeans who settled America were people who fled religious persecution in search of religious freedom.   Of course, the fine folks at FNC like to pull that plum from the pudding and stick it in the eye of the Christmas-haters, claiming that “religious freedom is on the rocks” in the land of the Pilgrims.  I leave it to Jon Stewart to set that straw man on fire (click the pics for a two-part pertinent and amusing holiday-themed retort):

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