When I was editor-in-chief of Spare Change News from 2003 to 2007, one of my reporters made a phone call that, in retrospect, proved to be quite interesting. But more on that soon.
Our writer emeritus Jeff Guevin forwarded me this Salon article in which Glenn Greenwald comments on the controversy surrounding a recent article that led to U.S. President Barack Obama firing the general in charge of the war in Afghanistan:
With his Rolling Stone article on Gen. [Stanley] McChrystal, Michael Hastings has become both the personification of, and spokesperson for, Real Journalism, and as a result, has provoked intense animosity from establishment-serving “reporters” everywhere.
He apparently committed the gravest sin: he exposed and embarrassed rather than flattered and protected a powerful government official, and in our upside-down media culture, doing that is a sign of irresponsibility rather than fulfillment of the basic journalistic function.
First of all, I am not going to comment directly on the Rolling Stone article because I do not know the circumstances under which it was published. There are too many questions: Was anything considered “off the record” or “on background”? Was this communicated to the reporter? If so, did he violate those agreements? The rule of thumb for anyone — anyone — talking to a journalist is that everything assumed to be “on the record” unless it is explicitly stated otherwise (and usually beforehand).
What I can discuss is the constant tension between “news” and “access” in the context of journalism, whether it is local or international. And this is where my story from my SCN days is relevant.First, the background. Before I became the editor, Spare Change News was viewed as an advocacy, lobbyist newspaper — or even a “liberal” rag at worst — that was always biased, especially on issues of homelessness. (The issue is actually complicated, and there are many sides.) When I was hired in 2003, my goal was to “reposition” the newspaper in the market as a professional publication that would cover so-called social-justice issues as fairly and impartially as possible. But many people did not get the memo.
So, my reporter once called a government agency to find out what they were doing on a specific project. (Obviously, I still cannot give details.) The low-level assistant who answered the phone said something like this: “We’re not doing anything on that right now — other projects are the priority.” The clerk, of course, was assuming that we were still a lobbyist organization who was calling for information rather than a newspaper that was calling for information to print.
So, my reporter had a story: This government department was doing nothing on an issue that was important to our readers. A scoop, right? Well, wait.
The assistant must have realized his mistake because the spokesperson for the government agency left my reporter a message stating that the clerk’s information was “off the record” because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
My reporter asked me what he should do. In my formerly-blunt, hard-boiled editor mindset, I said: “Fuck them — they messed up, and you got the truth. Write the story. If they have a problem, say your editor ordered you to do it.” One common trick in journalism is for reporters and editors to play good-cop and bad-cop in dicey situations.
And then, an hour later, I got a voice mail. The spokesperson told me that if we printed the story, we would be blacklisted — no callbacks, no quotes, no information, no leads, nothing for the foreseeable future. So, what did I do? More on that soon.
I admire the fact that Greenwald believes that the Rolling Stone article was an example of “Real Journalism” as opposed to “Establishment-Serving Journalism.” That might be the truth. But his feelings are only correct in an idealistic world that does not work in the world of realistic journalism. Reporters — and their editors — make compromises all the time. This is the issue: “Is this story worth any future access that I might lose?” I am not saying that I agree with it — I am writing only that this is the unfortunate way in which the journalistic world works.
When I debated my response to the government spokesperson, I had to consider this question. SCN covered this particular agency all the time — and if we were blacklisted, we might not have enough news to fill a paper each time. But was this story worth the sacrifice? It is an example of a real, practical concern that all journalists face.
In the end, I told the press officer that my reporter would consider the phone call to be “off the record” and that he would quote only comments from another spokesperson (who would then call shortly). Of course, the reporter was upset. But as I told him, the story itself was not exactly Watergate — in the big-picture it was not important enough to risk a total loss of future access. I am not proud of it — but I had a newspaper to run. If it had been a major story that was vitally important to the public interest, I would have said the journalistic equivalent of “Damn the torpedoes!”
Here is the point. Whenever a reporter covers something important like the White House, the general in charge of Afghanistan, or even Boston City Hall, there are always trade-offs and political negotiations. If a reporter reports his exclusives all the time without regard to the consequences, then he will lose all of his contacts and sources — and end up unable to work and report future news afterward. If a reporter never reports his exclusives, then he is not doing his job. Finding the middle ground is difficult. It is always a subjective decision.
Again, I do not know the circumstances that led to the Rolling Stone article. But the end result (whether right or wrong) was a prime example of a reporter valuing a story over his future access. A different reporter might have done something different — we can never know.