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Archives for March 2003

The White House press corps quote game

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Readers of the letters page on Jim Romenesko’s media news blog were treated this week to a remarkable admission about how the White House news operation cooks quotes — and how the press plays along. (Scroll down on the linked page to find the letter; the Poynter site will probably keep changing the link, given how its letters page is organized.) Washington Post economics correspondent Jonathan Weisman told the sorry tale, in detail that makes any conscientious reporter cringe. Weisman wanted to interview a particular administration economist; the White House press office insisted not only that the interview be considered off the record, but also that all quotes from the interview be run by the press office before publication. (I’m finding this confusing already since I’ve always understood “off the record” to mean no quotes at all — “Not for attribution” is when you’re okay with being quoted but don’t want your names on the quote.)

Weisman’s source actually said, “This is probably the most academic proposal ever to come out of an administration,” but upon reviewing his quote, the press office said, the official wanted it to read, instead, “This is probably the purest, most far reaching economic proposal ever to come out of an administration.” Gee, I wonder why?

Weisman assented to this whole process but later had second thoughts: “The notion that reporters are routinely submitting quotations for approval, and allowing those quotes to be manipulated to get that approval, strikes me as a step beyond business as usual.”

Uh, yeah. It’s more than a step beyond business as usual. It’s insane, outrageous, unconscionable. This is Journalism 101; it’s basic. You don’t let people review their quotes after they talk to you because they always have second thoughts about the most revealing things that they say. In the situation Weisman describes, of course, we don’t even know whether it was the original speaker who had second thoughts, or whether the quote-doctoring was being stage-managed by a press office enforcing a party line.

I empathize with the reporter whose tough assignment is to write stories about any White House — particularly one, like Bush’s, that is determined to close ranks and let no truth trickle out to the press. If your job is to get quotes from the White House and the White House says you don’t get quotes unless you play by our rules, maybe you have no choice.

What you do have a choice about is what you reveal about the process by which you got your quotes. And so, while I’m grateful that Weisman chose to blow the whistle via his letter to Romenesko, the place he should have done this was in his story. Just as a good newspaper will alert its readers to the fact that a report from the front has been reviewed by military censors, a quote from the White House that the White House got to doctor should come with, in essence, a consumer warning.

What I’d really love to know, now that Weisman has opened the door on this abuse a crack, is just how widespread it is. Weisman says it’s “fairly standard.” If newspaper editors told their reporters to tell readers every time a quote had been pre-reviewed by the White House, how frequently would the columns of the Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the other pillars of our journalistic establishment have to stop to note such a betrayal of their own ethics? And how soon would the insidious practice end?

Another grim world

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I spent the better part of my youth listening to Brian Eno’s albums “Here Come the Warm Jets” and “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).” In later years, I found his discourse on art, science and technology to be valuable and fascinating. Now he is providing a thoughtful perspective on how the U.S. looks from Europe. It’s an important read.

As my colleague Joe Conason points out, what a shame that this is available only in the Time magazine “European edition.” Sort of defeats the purpose…

You can’t always sing what you want

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So you’re the chief censor for the Chinese Communists, looking at the Rolling Stones’ set list for the forthcoming tour (drawn from their “40 Licks” hits collection) and deciding which songs Mick and Keith can or can’t play. Do you —

(1) Ban the incendiary “Street Fighting Man” and the nihilistic “Sympathy For the Devil,” songs with genuinely subversive and violent messages?

or:
(2) Ban “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” “Beast of Burden” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” because they’re somehow lascivious (though lord knows why they are considered more objectionable than other Stones hits like “Under My Thumb”)?

China chose door number two. I guess trying to fathom how the censor’s mind works is a hopeless undertaking.

Can “the bubble of American supremacy” burst?

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In an op-ed, George Soros argues that the Bush administration’s overconfidence shares the characteristics of a market bubble: “I see parallels between the Bush administration’s pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not arise out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but misconception distorts reality. Here, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of American supremacy the misconception. For a while, reality reinforces the misconception, but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable.”

It’s not the war itself we should worry about, but the aftermath, Soros argues: “Rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. Oil prices could fall, stock markets could celebrate, consumers could resume spending, and business could step up capital expenditures. America would end its dependency on Saudi oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations could start with North Korea without loss of face. That is what Mr Bush counts on. But military victory in Iraq is the easy part. It is what comes after that gives pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception which gave rise to it. That is to be feared here.”

Interestingly, this view finds an echo in an extraordinary, overheated, fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today by Oriana Fallaci, who thinks Bush and Blair are right to fight but that they (and we) may ultimately, like the defenders of the Alamo, be doomed:

  Upheld by their stubborn optimism, the same optimism for which at the Alamo they fought so well and all died slaughtered by Santa Anna, Americans think that in Baghdad they will be welcomed as they were in Rome and Florence and Paris. “They’ll cheer us, throw us flowers.” Maybe. In Baghdad anything can happen. But after that? Nearly two-thirds of the Iraqis are Shiites who have always dreamed of establishing an Islamic Republic of Iraq, and the Soviets too were once cheered in Kabul. They too imposed their peace. They even succeeded in convincing women to take off their burqa, remember? After a while, though, they had to leave. And the Taliban came. Thus, I ask: what if instead of learning freedom Iraq becomes a second Talibani Afghanistan? What if instead of becoming democratized by the Pax Americana the whole Middle East blows up and the cancer multiplies?

It seems odd that only now, with a quarter of a million troops in the field and war hanging by a hair, is the debate beginning to turn to that ultimate question of any military conflict: What happens afterwards? Scariest of all is the thought that President Bush, who has so far botched the peace in Afghanistan, hasn’t grappled with it at all.

Who is Marcy Kaptur and why exactly should she be ashamed?

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Last week I started getting bombarded with nearly identical e-mails about an Ohio congresswoman named Marcy Kaptur, who, I was told, ought to be ashamed of the awful things she had said — something about comparing Osama bin Laden to the founding fathers. Why these correspondents thought I should be apprised of Rep. Kaptur’s need to be ashamed, I did not know. But I had a pretty good idea: whenever this sort of e-mail bombardment begins, Rush Limbaugh is usually behind it. And indeed he was.

The record suggests that in fact Kaptur’s argument was more complex and historical than the dittoheads are able to comprehend. Douglas Anders of the Agora offers links and two commentaries on the whole affair. [Links courtesy Rogers Cadenhead]

COPA news

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Those of you with long memories will recall the saga of the Child Online Protection Act, once known as “CDA II.” “CDA I,” an effort to restrict “indecent” communications online, was struck down by the courts as an unconstitutionally broad restriction of free speech on the Net. The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was Congress’s attempt to outlaw or restrict porn online by drawing a narrower standard that might pass legal muster. The ACLU sued the government, immediately after the bill was signed into law in 1998, on behalf of Salon and a group of other plaintiffs representing a broad swath of online publishing and businesses who felt the new law was also highly problematic. (You can read Salon’s original editorial on the matter here.) The ACLU and our plaintiffs’ group won in district court, and won again at the appeals court level. The Supreme Court offered a complex mixed ruling last year that essentially sent the law back to the appeals court for further review.

Well, the appeals court issued a ruling late yesterday, in favor of ACLU and the plaintiffs. According to the ruling, “COPA’s reliance on ‘community standards’ to identify material ‘harmful to minors’ could not meet the exacting standards of the First Amendment.’ ”

I don’t doubt that the Ashcroft Justice Department will wish to challenge this ruling once more — it has 90 days to decide. And so the whole thing is likely to end up back before the Supreme Court once more.

Time out

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I’m taking this week off to tend to some personal and family business — and to catch my breath — so blogging will be light…