Closed to Press -- Not Off The Record
I tried to stay out of the over-heated gusting that blew through the comments section of my previous post (below) on Bittergate. Sorry to be a bit patronizing here, but what the heck. But I just love it when folks who have NO idea what they're talking about on a certain matter have such sharp opinions. Long live the Web!
What we should have have been discussing --primarily-- was the political impact of what Obama said. Or the lack of impact. His acuity or his denseness. The media's frenetic response -- or was it a measured reaction. Those sort of things.
Instead, we witnessed pretty much a horrid gang rape of the the reporter who broke the story. Oh, excuse me, the blogger. Simply killing the messenger would have been, by contrast, an act of mercy compared to the dump-truck of innuendo, insinuation and outright slander piled onto her. And, by consequence then, also on to the very notion of citizen journalism, their outlets and, um, by extension on their editors. 
Fascinating how True Believers who have always had a knee-jerk reflex to blame the (Old) media for their own shortcomings are just as ready to blame the New. Surprise, surprise.
This morning, however, comes (somewhat belatedly) official word from the Obama camp which ought to (but won't) douse the spoutings of those who have attacked Mayhill Fowler and her methods and her (and our) ethics. An excellent analysis of the whole dust-up appears in the San Fran Chron and in it we read this graph:
 Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said Tuesday that while the San Francisco event was closed to traditional media, it was not off the record. The campaign has not denied or challenged Fowler's version of the event. Burton said there's an expectation now - even at private events - that everything will be recorded and posted.
Oh, how about that? Gag my commenters with a spoon, please. I believe that's what I've been saying for the last five days. And kudos to the Obama campaign for offering the most sensible and mature of responses -- on the record.
The Chron piece further notes that the fund raiser that Fowler attended was absolutely fair game for reporters because regardless of who was allowed in or not, there were no pre-conditions or ground rules established that over-ruled the First Amendment.
Since the campaign did not say that the event was off the record, Fowler did not violate any ethical agreement, said Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association. "When there are no rules of engagement defined, then everything is on the record," Cox said.
A generation ago, pop culture artist Andy Warhol said that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, but now "everybody will be a paparazzi for 15 minutes," said Dan Manatt, executive producer of Politicstv.com, a video aggregating site.
Tuesday at TechPresident.com, Manatt wrote that "campaign managers should consider, on a daily basis, reminding candidates of their Digital Miranda rights.
"You have the right to be recorded - and should expect you are being videotaped and recorded 24/7. Anything you say can and will be used against you by your opponents. Beware that something that sounds OK in one setting may be a gaffe in another setting," Manatt wrote.
And as I had also predicted, Fowler was not the only person in that room recording and posting. She couldn't have been, given that she saw dozens of videocams blinking away as Obama spoke. Now another piece surfaces.
Palo Alto resident Glennia Campbell posted video Sunday from the fundraiser and wrote more positively about it at Momocrats (momocrats.typepad.com/momocrats), a blog she co-founded. "For me, it wasn't so much about reporting what he said, but expanding access to the event to people who might not been able to afford to go to it, " Campbell said.
So what do our armchair ethicists make of that? Please consider the question only rhetorical. Few are interested in your responses, I assure you.
On to the Clinton/Obama debate tonight. Please don't TiVO it. Those debate rooms are closed to the press. And unless you've got one of those shiny little "reporter" badges you got at the bottom of a Cheerios box, you're not official.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:15 am
That was an epic shitstorm, Marc.
Btw, what did you make of Joseph Palermo at Huffpo? His take:
—According to her bio on the Huffington Post, Mayhill Fowler is a middle-aged Southern belle “born and bred in Tennessee” who moved to Houston, and later became a California resident.
—How must the first African American presidential candidate to make it this far behave? How much “confidence” in his own abilities can he show before people like Fowler label him “cocky?” And what are Fowler’ credentials to make this kind of judgment? Do her white Southern roots allow her to really see a black candidate? Or is Obama to her Ralph Ellison’s “invisible man?”
Charming, no?
April 16th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Marc: “But I just love it when folks who have NO idea what they’re talking about on a certain matter have such sharp opinions. Long live the Web!”
That’s what I’ve been saying! Marc, it’s you and me against the world.
Now, I might be wrong, but don’t journalists put a story above alleged professional ethics and will protect sources despite court orders to reveal them? There isn’t anything off the record.
April 16th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Actually Marc, an awful lot of the comments – possibly most, but it’s arguable – were on whether Fowler’s take was good reporting on what she witnessed as a journalist and a service to readers who weren’t present, not whether it was legitimate for it to be written about at all. You yourself noted that it was heavy on Fowler and thin on Obama. There was also lots of discussion on the political implications. Which are looking pretty negligible, as I predicted (okay…as I hoped.)
April 16th, 2008 at 11:41 am
Well, aside from never having been too partial to rape metaphors, I couldn’t agree more.
He said it. That’s all there is to that part of it (although I do appreciate the better contextualized report on the same event that reg originally posted). The issue is whether this has any legs, and as I suspected, it does not.
The further issue is why the press has turned into such a pack of blood-thirsty hyenas who parse every pronouncement as if it they were scoring exegetical points in a self-important grad school class (we all know the type I suspect).
April 16th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I’m not too partial to blood-thirsty hyena metaphors, but I couldn’t agree more.
April 16th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I’ve largely stayed out of this, but this comment in the article in the New York Times is bizarre:
That’s an asinine reason if I’ve ever heard one. Molly Ivins was from texas and was steeped in texas politics all her life, but I doubt if she would have donated money to Dubya – or Ron Paul for that matter.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
“Molly Ivins was from texas and was steeped in texas politics all her life, but I doubt if she would have donated money to Dubya – or Ron Paul for that matter.”
Ivins, a plagiarist, was born in Monterrey, California.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
And your point is . . . ?
She was raised in Houston. John McCain was born in Panama, but I don’t think of him as being Panamanian.
Allow me to give another example.
My family was steeped in Alabama politics since the mid 19th century, but I could not imagine them sending money to Jeff sessions or Richard Shelby if they decided to run for president.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
The only thing that matters about Ms. Fowler is whether or not her recording was accurate, and it apparently was.
As I said in a post on the previous entry in this blog, we used to rely on traditional media reporters for stories like this, but now they seem to believe they owe their allegiance to PR people and campaign strategists, not their readers/viewers.
I was at the CNN/YouTube Republican debate in St. Petersburg, FL, and what got to me most about it was the way reality was altered by the way it was lit and produced for TV. In fact, I wrote about that observation for the Online Journalism Review — http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/071203miller/
A huge proportion of what we call “news” these days is what I call “manufactured news” — a category into which I place all staged events and press releases and official announcements. To me, the job our “professional journalists” have abdicated is going behind that curtain to see how different things look when the lights are off and the actors are sitting around talking about the show behind the audience’s back.
- R
April 16th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
“Actually Marc, an awful lot of the comments – possibly most, but it’s arguable – were on whether Fowler’s take was good reporting on what she witnessed as a journalist and a service to readers who weren’t present, not whether it was legitimate for it to be written about at all.”
My sentiments exactly. I think most people agreed that it was legit to report on the event or that they at least didn’t know enogh about the preconditions to conclude otherwise. They questioned Mayhill’s take on the affair, and in some cases (me for example) whether her previous coverage of Obama should have raised some red flags inside the Obama camp. If they, in fact, considered this as an event where he could speak more freely than usual, and also figured that Mayhill would have his back, then I think they dropped the ball.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
The ‘they’ in the last sentence refers to the Obama camp.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Okay. Molly gets to be a Texan. I get to be one too, although I was borned in Connecticutt, which I’m not sure I can spell.
Molly was steeped in in Wellsley, Columbia, The New York Times, and The (unread) Texas Observer. No wonder she was everybody’s favorite Texan.
(And she was a plagiarist.)
April 16th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
My problem with Fowler isn’t that she reported on Obama, but that she did it without any awareness that his remarks would be seen as damaging to his campaign. You’ve called her a “highly-educated, sophisticated intellectual”. I don’t think she’s particularly bright at all. And what makes her “sophisticated”? An inability to discern how working-class people think?
Her bio page at HP reads: ” What can I tell you? I’m an over-educated sixty year-old woman with politics in my blood.”
Anybody that goes around saying that they are “over-educated” is a pretentious jerk.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I see. One should not report things that could be damaging to a campaign — even one you are sympathetic to. Ok, noted and filed.
April 16th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Heaps of praise to journalist-blogger Mayhill Fowler and her editors for the excellent coverage of the Obama fundraiser. Some of the fallout exposes, again, the sorry state of scared-of-its-shadow MSM and their alleged practictioners. Keep it up, and MSM will be totally marginalized by the 2012 elections.
April 16th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Apart from, ahem, journalism professors, who cares whether it was good journalism or not? Here’s an idea for you liberals-why don;t you try to stand for something and defend yourselves for a change? Why can’t Obama’s buncha whiners just defend their candidate’s perfectly reasonable remarks instead of wasting their breath on trying to discredit the blogger or parsing the meaning of “closed to the press?”
I repeat my comment from yesterday-liberals are so cowed by defeat that they don’t even try any more, or perhaps they are so accustomed to the state of high moral dudgeon that they assume that if they say anything meaningful, it will offend someone.
April 16th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
The Obama campaign is working hard to make lemonade out of this pile of lemons.
Hmm …
They certainly didn’t expect this from the Huffington Post, which remains a key supporter in cyberland, or from their supporter and contributor Mayhill Fowler.
Nevertheless, I was told in no uncertain terms when I tried to get into the event that it was private, off the record, and closed to the press.
April 16th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I am sure my good friend Bill is telling the truth. They didnt want you in the event and they told you so.
But, in spite of Bill’s excellent blog (or is it an online reporting site? And is Bill an analyst, an activist, a blogger or a reporter? His material is aggregated on the Rough and Tumble site with other Calif news but his pieces are the only ones that go thru no editorial process and have no overseeing editor ‘cuz he’s a blogger… and so what? ) he seems to still not get the central point: closed, not closed off the record, on the record whatever…. it’s a bit of fantasy to close something in which you allow hundreds of people to attend packing their own digital equipment. So what do we call that other woman and her actions, you know the Obama supporter from momcrat mentioned in the Sf Chronicle piece? Did she violate some mysterious rule as well when she posted Obama video from the event on her blog? Will future attendees at fund raisers have to pass through metal detectors and check their cameras and recorders and their memories at the door? Will folks who have given a couple of grand be told they can’t take pictures or videos when they finally get to meet and greet their candidates? Is the solution requiring donors to sign NDA’s before entering the door of so called closed door events? Please.
I think Bill Burton of the Obama campaign — lemonade or not– gave a completely rational and practical answer totally befitting the digital age in which his campaign now operates. Must we now parse it 50 different ways? (I already know THAT answer)
I am 100% sure, by the way, that when Obama spoke that Sunday night he was indeed assuming that anything he said could become public. He was not being two-faced, he wasn’t saying anything that in his mind was not fit for public-consumption or that was “private” and he very well might have uttered the very same words at a public Town Hall somewhere or another the next day.
Also, as my final point on this now wearisome subject… I don’t know about other journos reading this, but I have attempted on several occasions to enter “closed events” and have sometimes succeeded. When I have, I felt no ethical obligation to NOT report what I saw and heard… that is what we call enterprising journalism. On the contrary, it’s when you are ALLOWED into an event on the explicit pre-condition that you will not report, that is when your action is limited. For the umpteenth time now, Fowler was a donor to the Obama campaign but she was known to them primarily and intimately as a prolific reporter following the campaign. Couldn’t be clearer.
I’m tired of repeating the sky is blue so I will merely say the SF Chron piece is an excellent sum-up of the real issues without any spin — or archaic misunderstanding.
April 16th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I read your blog for your take on social issues, Marc, and to see who pisses off (like the unctuous Clintons) activist journos like yourself. I look for exposes on fissures in the sociopolitical fabric more, much less for wanky semantic commentary by self appointed keyboard gurus.
As someone who has been somewhat controversially cited in the local papers 6 times in the past year, I’m just glad the diction challenged, grammatically lax, and typo- filled “mainstream” local media spell my name right.
I like media-attractive Obama’s at times naive and chaotic campaigning that’s filled with platitudes . That is exactly why I’m supporting him.
Obama’s style can really get people pissed off, which might help accelerate the dissolution of this decrepit Imperial corporate status quo “republic”.
And that will be thanks to the media.
April 16th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Marc, as you know very well, I am an accredited member of the press and treated as such. Running round the mulberry bush with the musings below is off-point.
The event was closed to the press. Therefore it was closed to me.
Mayhill Fowler, who is not a member of the press, was there in another guise. Contrary to what you first reported, she was not invited by the communications staff. She was invited by a lower level fundraiser.
The Obama campaign is publicly, and not really going out of their way to do so, waiting to say this to a little noted SF Chronicle article, as part of a much larger strategy of making lemonade out of a pile of lemons.
This has been a lemonade sort of episode, as you and I know.
>And is Bill an analyst, an activist, a blogger or a reporter? His material is aggregated on the Rough and Tumble site with other Calif news but his pieces are the only ones that go thru no editorial process and have no overseeing editor ‘cuz he’s a blogger… and so what? ) he seems to still not get the central point: closed, not closed off the record, on the record whatever….
April 16th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Marc says, “I am 100% sure, by the way, that when Obama spoke that Sunday night he was indeed assuming that anything he said could become public.”
I’ll bypass addressing your sarcastic – dare I say bitterly condescending – condemnation of those (like myself) who find your argument against journalistic procedure to be somewhat illogical.
However, I cannot let your above quote fly under the radar without scrutiny. In fact, it is rather laughable. You are saying that you are 100 percent correct based on YOUR assumption drawn from what someone else may or may not have been assuming? Uh? Whu?
And therein lies my problem with your described editorial process that led to the publication of Fowler’s piece. As journalists, we are to assume nothing. We sure as hell can be skeptical, for that leads us to further investigate the truth behind the subjects we cover. To assume that we think we have it right … when maybe, just maybe … we have it wrong? Inexcusable.
I s’pose that’s why we have sources. To clarify what is blurred.
But you already know that.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Note Marc hasn’t a word to say about Fowler’s crappy writing and failure to provide anything resembling an accurate context for Obama’s remarks.
The question isn’t whether Fowler is entitled to report from places where journalists are banned, but whether as a “modified limited journalist” she’s allowed to pollute the media ecosphere in ways that would get a “journalist” fired or, at least, reassigned to something more appropriate to their amateur skill level.
As far as the “issue” about Obama’s remarks themselves: what could be sillier. Is there anyone on this blog who would contest the veracity of his comments?
Is there anyone who doubts his purpose in making them, given the context so misleadingly left out of Fowler’s turdpile?
April 16th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Bill.. dont know what you mean by an “accredited member of the press.” Not insulting you, but it just doesn’t mean very much. In fact, it means nothing at all. Any organization can accredit anyone they please. I have about 15 press pasess currently and I believe everyone is them expired. And? As you know, the Los Angeles Press Club accredits pr flacks and stringers for the Daily Racing Form. It even gives them a cool Media parking plaque for their car — mine is also expired but I still use it.
My USC students, on the other hand, will be reporting for NPR and PBS this summer but sans any accreditation whatsoever. Two of my students have published in the Washington Post and two others in L.A. Times — with bylines in the news section. They are unaccredited. What are they? Students or journalists?
Lemonade? For sure. But your insistence on making these categorical divisions just doesnt hold up much anymore. To which editor at newwestnotes does someone complain if they dont like what you write?
None. Does that make you any lesser of a journalist? No. You couldnt get in to the Obama event indeed because you were “accredited.” Next time, try to go as a blogger!
Careful that your lemonade doesnt start to taste like sour grapes juice. Truth is Mayhill could get into the event that you couldnt precisely because she is more comfortable functioning in that area of ambiguity that your aren’t.
Bunkerbuster… “turdpile?” Now that’s some real elegant writing. That’s also the last straw for you. Bye now.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Actually, Marc, next time I should be a maxed-out contributor to Obama who tries to sneak in by conning a low-level fundraiser.
Except that wouldn’t work, because senior people in the Obama campaign would recognize me and make sure I couldn’t get in.
Because I am a journalist.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
… Oh. Actually, that is simply wrong. There are accrediting authorities that are not whatever.com or the LA Press Club.
For example, there is the State of California, the LAPD, etc., etc.
As you know.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
… Now back to the aftermath of the contentious, tabloid-style debate, in which Bittergate certainly figured.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
I’ll be the only one here to give a balanced view after the debate. Due to “remote” wars, the tv constantly flipped between the debate, American Idol, and the Braves game, so my view with be balanced on three shows.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Anyone who has a problem with Mayhill Fowler is special pleading. What if her blogging opposite went into a closed-to-the-press McCain fundraiser and recorded him calling some brown-skinned guy “maccaca?’ Or opining that women who believe in all that sexual equality stuff are femi-nazis because they are plain, and never get asked out?
You would deplore and condemn her ethical lapse then, would you, now?
Despite what many of you are wishfully thinking, Obama-Hillbillygate was a very big deal.
At least a third, and up to half of the active electorate is neither partisan nor invested in the silly idea that the world will go straight to hell in the next 4 years, unless you vote Right or Left.
For that audience, Obama just took his second strike. The first was for hanging out, the last twenty years, with a racist nut-job who fawns over Calypso Louie and urges you to believe that the CIA cooked AIDS up in a lab to kill black people.
The second strike, for saying that rural working class whites only care about their right to bear arms, their pietistic brand of Christianity and illegal immigration because they don’t make enough money.
It’s all of one piece. The grand narrative of root cause and false conciousness.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Speaking of context, methinks Samuel Stott hasn’t even watched the video of the speech….
April 16th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
I can’t believe this discussion is still going on. The journalistic issues are so basic. With all due respect to Bill Bradley, no one can put an event attended by hundreds of people “off the record.” The only thing that can be off the record is a face to face conversation between a reporter and a source. If a reporter manages to get into an event “closed to the press,” he or she is just doing their job. Reporters are supposed to go where they are not wanted. Period. As I said before, this is all hypocrisy; if a blogger had snuck into a Clinton event where she said something damaging, Obama supporters would be thrilled about it. Period again.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
Mr. Stott writes, “Anyone who has a problem with Mayhill Fowler is special pleading. What if her blogging opposite went into a closed-to-the-press McCain fundraiser and recorded him calling some brown-skinned guy “maccaca?’ Or opining that women who believe in all that sexual equality stuff are femi-nazis because they are plain, and never get asked out?”
I would expect a reporter to approach your hypothetical with the approach that asks the candidate WHY he or she said what they said.
The explanation of ‘why’ should not be a first person account of what the writer experienced. The account should not be based on feelings, opinion or assumptions. An accurate retelling of the event along with an explanation from the candidate would be fair.
And then the media shit storm would follow.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Samantha Power, an Obama adviser, called Hillary Clinton “a monster” and asked that it be off the record, but it wasn’t and she had to leave his campaign over that. Nothing is off the record–except bad behavior by successful football coaches and good players.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Let me make what I am saying absolutely clear. The ONLY “off the record” conversations are those where a reporter and a source MUTUALLY AGREE that it is off the record. No one can unilaterally put a meeting, event, etc off the record. They can TRY to bar the press from coming, but that doesn’t mean it is unethical for a reporter to try to get in anyway. That is the principle. In the case of Mayhill Fowler, however, she didn’t sneak in–she was allowed in. Once she got in, she was under no obligation whatsoever to refrain from reporting what she heard, and as Marc points out, there was not even an expectation from the Obama folkds that anyone would. Ridiculous to even have such an expectation in this day and age, everyone going around with a cell phone at the very least–meaning that absolutely everyone is armed with a voice recorder, video recorder, and still camera everywhere they go.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
For the record, I don’t really give a rat’s arse about the on the record, off the record discussion going on here. Proceed …
April 16th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Thanks TL, for underscoring that the real issue here for true believer Obama supporters is no one should do anything that might possibly embarrass their guy. I am rooting for Obama too, but it is disheartening to see how many Obamaniacs want to play by the Hillary Clinton rulebook. Leave the nasty work to the nasties, and take a cue from your hero, whose got more principles than a lot of his supporters.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
“Thanks TL, for underscoring that the real issue here for true believer Obama supporters is no one should do anything that might possibly embarrass their guy.”
News organizations – professional or not – have an obligation to report on the mundane, trivial to the fantastic. I don’t have an issue with Fowler attending and reporting about an event – whether private or public. Whether invited or not. I don’t have a problem with her exposing Obama’s quote.
The problems I have are within the editorial decisions made prior to publishing the story, as well as some ethical concerns.
My two biggest nits:
1. Fowler is an admitted contributor/supporter to Obama’s campaign.
2. Editors at Huff Post had a MAJOR concern about his quote but failed to get a counter response from the Obama camp.
Like Hillary, I am beating a dead horse. I’ll shut up now.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Michael Balter says the journalistic issues “are simple” yet he avoids them entirely in favor of the “off record” canard.
The real journalism issue is whether Fowler is a credible, responsible reporter. The answer is clearly no. She failed utterly to provide the context of Obama’s remarks and, as a result, presented work that was entirely misleading.
Moreover, the editors at OTB failed utterly at their jobs, part of which is quality control.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Hi everyone. I asked Time Magazine’s Jay Newton-Small why she called Mayhill Fowler’s report a “leak. ” To me it’s a report from someone who was there. I just thought it was a strange way to talk about the post. Today she wrote about it at Swampland…
Fascinating. If, as an OffTheBus blogger, I go to an on-the-record event that is not accessible to the press, then the report I file is a leak. Whereas if the press goes to an on-the-record event that is not accessible to me, the report filed is just… a report.
Can that be right? Yup. Read it yourself.
April 17th, 2008 at 3:00 am
I am the person quoted in the SF Gate article (thanks for the link to MOMocrats, Marc). I was at the event, first as an Obama supporter, and secondarily as a blogger who writes a political blog aimed at mothers. I wrote about it immediately after the event and posted a clip of video on YouTube. I didn’t report the “bitter” comment because it seemed to me, the child of blue collar workers, that he was just stating what I know to be true; that people in the midwest are having a hard time and have been disappointed by government for years. It’s no wonder that they turn to things that give them a sense of comfort and security, whether it’s faith, firearms, or family. I did not hear condescension or belittling or stereotyping. “Bitter” is in the eye of the beholder.
I’ve been attending political events for a year, for Clinton, Kucinich, Edwards, and Obama, and have blogged about every one. No one ever told me not to. At several, I went not as a supporter, but as someone trying to decide who to vote for. I wrote what I saw, what I perceived, and my opinions and conclusions, strengths and weaknesses of all of the candidates.
I videotaped snippets of Obama’s remarks, not because I wanted them to show up on the news, but because I wanted to record a little slice of history for my son. I wanted him to be able to watch it and remember the time he shook the hand of the (hopefully) future president or (at minimum) an historic figure. I would say anyone in that room with a camera was doing the same. I’m not sure that journalists are doing anything terribly different from that, recording history as it happens.
I’m not going to change what I do because of this, except maybe buy a better video camera. I really hope the campaign doesn’t change anything either.
Am I a journalist? Nah. I’m a blogger, unapologetically so.
April 17th, 2008 at 5:16 am
Fowler’s access to an event that was closed to journalist is certainly an issue of limited, specific professional concern.
But for the public and the readers, the “off record” debate is a canard.
The real issue is whether Fowler did a credible job of reporting the event and how her performance reflects on OTB and its standards.
And, Marc, if you’re going to try and censor my comments, you really should learn how to operate the system a little better–if you can.
April 17th, 2008 at 9:03 am
Obama has taken huge advantage of the fact that there is an internet and that there are internet blogs, probably to the tune of fifty million dollars or so in contributions. Bloggers don’t subscribe to the standard journalistic “ethics,” ie: that true journalists are political geldings, neither revealing nor having political positions themselves. What comes out of the traditional journalistic style is, inter alia, the disgrace that ABC put on Wednesday night. What comes out of the internet style is lots of things, and Obama and McCain will have to take the good with the bad, the bitter with the sweet over the next six months.
What strikes me about this little firestorm is the underlying fear among us not so religious Obama supporters, namely that the truth he spoke about religious fundamentalism will offend the fundamentalists; we agree but wish he hadn’t said it, and so some of us blame the messenger.
There is a quandary here for Obama. One of his essential charms is his candor, one might say honesty. As this trait gets thrown back in his face, he will have to figure out whether he wants to take a more polished (but emotionally less connecting) approach or continue being himself. I suspect that the former, more cynical approach would backfire. I would like to think that the voters will respond to honesty on the stump as something long overdue and a significant virtue in itself.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Yes, oddly enough, haha, another journalist who covers politicians all the time thinks the private fundraisers are off the record to journalists.
Which, in fact, is the case.
We are now in the age of Pirate Media. People taking advantage of access accorded them as ACTIVIST and FINANCIAL supporters of politicians, who then turn around and produce their private musings for the public to see on the Internet.
As my role model Fox Mulder put it: “Trust no one.”
>Jay Rosen Says:
April 16th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Hi everyone. I asked Time Magazine’s Jay Newton-Small why she called Mayhill Fowler’s report a “leak. †To me it’s a report from someone who was there. I just thought it was a strange way to talk about the post. Today she wrote about it at Swampland…
Traditionally fundraisers have been closed to press and off the record.
February 16th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
[...] Cooper, editorial director of OffTheBus, defended Fowler on his personal blog, highlighting that the conversation should have been directed at the [...]