STUMP: media and politics

Not to Name Names

Slate's Jack Shafer writes the first negative criticism I've seen of the new Washington Post and New York Times attribution policies. Shafer's cynical about the success of the policies when it comes to covering the White House, given that reporters have called this White House stingy with its press access. If sources can't be anonymous in the WP and NYT, he argues, they'll just go to other news organizations and be anonymous.

But the policies don't say anonymous sources can't be used, only that they can't be used cavalierly. Reporters should try to get their sources to go on the record, and if they won't, reporters should try to give as much detail as they can about the source.

Already, the policies have resulted in more transparency in the papers' political stories. "A senior administration official" has become "one Republican official close to the re-election effort who did not want to be named for fear of angering Karl Rove." Attributions like that may shed more light on the inner workings of the White House than the quotes they accompany.

I've simplified Shafer's argument, which is certainly worth reading. He acknowledges the value of the policies right away, he just doubts their effectiveness. And the questions he poses are compelling, e.g. "How great a tragedy would it be if they gave the official agenda a bye and stopped reporting the incremental changes in White House policy that pass for news?"

Here's the second negative criticism I've seen, FYI.

Off the Record

Howard Kurtz reported this interesting tidbit in his column yesterday:

When a half-dozen reporters were following Sen. John Kerry, the presidential candidate often unwound with off-the-record chats. But now that the traveling press has swelled to 60, some reporters, led by Ron Fournier of the Associated Press, have insisted that he abandon the practice. Not everyone agrees.

"I value that experience because you get to know the candidate as a human being, even though you know he's spinning," says MSNBC correspondent Becky Diamond. "It's helpful to me in my relationship with him."

But Fournier argued that off-the-record tidbits often leak out, burning the reporters who agree to the restrictions. "Basically, AP believes the candidates should be on the record, especially in group settings," says Washington bureau chief Sandy Johnson.

The temporary compromise is that Kerry will talk to scribes on his plane only on the record or "on background" -- although Diamond finds the latter "very awkward because you can't report something he actually says."

Fournier's quote intrigues me the most. I wonder how a leaked off-the-record quote from Kerry looks in writing. Is he quoted as a "senior aide in the Kerry campaign"? (A very senior aide.) Maybe "sources from the Kerry campaign"?

Capturing the Reagans

What should we consider when mixing politics and entertainment in our coverage? This Columbia Journalism Review piece about "The Reagans," CBS' docudrama that got shunted off to Showtime, gives some thoughtful insights into just that question.

Ethics of Political Coverage

"The best time to deal with an ethical issue is before it becomes a problem." — Bob Steele

Steele's presentation to our merry band of political journalists stressed the importance of establishing a set of values to consider in dealing with ethical potholes. Steele also led a few conversations about ethics, giving us a model for how to ask these questions in our own newsrooms. We're not attempting to write rules, Steele said, but to establish protocols for talking about these issues.

The seminar participants split into small groups and considered four issues: privacy, resources, race, and bias. Here are some of the questions they came up with for each issue, and some of the values they want to uphold in considering these questions:

Editor's Account of Arnold Story

Los Angeles Times | The New York Times

In a Sunday column, L.A. Times Editor John S. Carroll chronicles the paper's handling of its investigation of sexual misconduct charges against Arnold Schwarzenegger, addressing the various rumors that have surfaced on talk radio and elsewhere.

In a Monday article posted online Sunday evening, Jim Rutenberg of the The New York Times notes that new media outlets such as cable and the Web are providing candidates with a variety of ways of bypassing what they regard as unfair coverage by mainstream media. He also reports that a growing percentage of voters believes the media impedes public officials' ability to do their jobs:

"Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which regularly polls people on attitudes toward the news media, said that in 1985, 17 percent of people said the news media got in the way of leaders trying to do their jobs, and nearly two-thirds said that critical coverage kept leaders from misbehaving. By last year, a third said critical news coverage got in the way."

The Times Factor

The Los Angeles Times' handling of its Schwarzenegger groper story raises plenty of questions about its sourcing and timing, many of them explored in today's Wall Street Journal and earlier in the San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today.

But much of the debate appears to be rooted in ideology, the latest skirmish between those who tend to see various Big Media as mouthpieces of the Left or the Right.

Who Says He Did What?

The L.A. Times publishes its investigation of Arnold Schwarzenegger's behavior with women in a 3,600-word piece played on Page One today. Schwarzenegger responded to the story with an apology for behaving "badly."

The investigation included allegations from six women, four of them un-named, and raises the kind of questions about anonymous sources that crop up in coverage of most campaigns. What considerations should guide the use of such sources in these kinds of situations?

The San Jose Mercury News followed up on The Times story with an online survey. Such surveys are notoriously unreliable as indices of public opinion, partly because of their self-selective nature. The Mercury News appears to guard against ballot stuffing by blocking repeat votes, but it raises the question: Should news organizations use unreliable survey tools to gauge public opinion on matters of significant interest?