http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/03/22/politico/print.html
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Glenn Greenwald
Mar. 22, 2007 | (Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)
This morning, The Politico's Ben Smith reported what seemed to be (and was widely treated as) a big scoop about John Edwards' scheduled noon announcement. According to Smith:
John Edwards is suspending his campaign for President, and may drop out completely, because his wife has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that sickened her in 2004, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, an Edwards friend told The Politico.That item was picked up in countless media venues and reported as fact. It turned out to be false, as Edwards announced today at his scheduled noon appearance that "his wife's cancer has returned but his bid for the White House will go on.""At a minimum he's going to suspend" the campaign, the source said.
Smith was forced to append a correction to his original item in which he acknowledged: "My source was wrong." He then added a new, very clear and straightforward acknowledgment of error -- called "Getting It Wrong" -- in which he admitted:
A single, confident source close to John Edwards told me this morning that Edwards was "suspending his campaign," and I posted it to the blog at 11:06 this morning.There is nothing shameful per se about making a mistake. It happens to everyone at some point, more than once, and when the mistake is quickly and candidly acknowledged and a transparent explanation provided -- as it was in Smith case's here -- I think it can reflect well on the mistake-maker and even be credibility-enhancing. Here, Smith had little choice -- it was glaringly obvious that he was wrong -- but he still did what he ought to have done.My source, and I, were wrong.
The source, whose anonymity I agreed to respect, spoke of the kind of grim prognosis Elizabeth Edwards herself just described hearing before a second round of tests came back. I trusted the source, somebody I've known for several years, and who has always been reliable.
And with less than an hour before Edwards was to announce, I unwisely wrote the item without getting a second source. . . .
My apologies to our readers for passing on bad information.
But this episode raises a larger point about how journalists behave which extends beyond Smith. On Monday of this week, Smith's colleague at The Politico, Mike Allen, published a report with the headline "White House Seeks Gonzales Replacement" -- which also ended being widely cited as fact -- strongly suggesting that Alberto Gonzales' firing was a fait accompli, and an imminent one at that. It contained rather emphatic claims like this:
Republican sources also disclosed that it is now a virtual certainty that Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, whose incomplete and inaccurate congressional testimony about the prosecutors helped precipitate the crisis, will also resign shortly. Officials were debating whether Gonzales and McNulty should depart at the same time or whether McNulty should go a day or two after Gonzales.But the following morning, the White House disclosed that the President had called Gonzales and expressed his firm and unwavering support, and that afternoon, the President held a Press Conference and made clear that Gonzales was staying, at least for the foreseeable future.
The original Politico article about Gonzales was published on Monday, March 19 (as multiple links to that article demonstrate). That was the day before Bush's phone call to Gonzales and his subsequent Press Conference that afternoon. The version on the Politico's website now is from the following day, March 20, where -- it appears -- the original version was edited to add, to the top of the story, the account of the President's supportive phone call to Gonzales (without any indication that it was changed, from what I can see).
The original story itself strongly conveyed the impression that the White House had committed itself to firing Gonzales. That is how the article was widely interpreted and why it received so much attention. The impression deliberately left by the report is something which also turned out, at least for now, to be false. Obviously, Gonzales might be fired at some point in the future, but the big "scoop" of the article -- that the firing process was underway and imminent -- was just not true.
What is happening at The Politico seems clear. That newspaper is filled with super-insider Beltway types who have all sorts of friends in various Washington crevices. They are constantly chatting with one another, exchanging all sorts of speculation and gossip, and always engaged in a perpetual competition to demonstrate who is the most keyed-in to the super-inside Beltway developments.
This insecure Beltway climate produces a natural temptation on the part of the "source" to represent one's speculation as "knowledge" and to exaggerate the quality and reliability of one's information. And it produces a corresponding motivation for Beltway journalists to want to believe that they have the most-insider sources and therefore to pass along rank gossip as news -- all in order to be "first," and for no other reason. They do this even when there is no journalistic value in the "scoop" even if it were accurate. That, for instance, was certainly true with Smith's announcement about what Edwards would say less than an hour before Edwards was scheduled to actually say it.
Just to get a sense for how shoddy this mistake was by Smith, and how shoddy Allen's report was as well, what they did seems indistinguishable from the humiliating mistake made in January by Pajamas Media and Michael Ledeen -- Pajamas Media and Michael Ledeen -- in which they screamed about their big "exclusive" that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was dead, even though he was, and still is, very much alive. Ledeen's excuse was the same as Smith's: "my source was wrong and I have been gulled."
There is no bright line between, on the one hand, passing on unreliable gossip as "news," and on the other, reporting what a reliable anonymous source has said. But journalists who hold themselves out -- and are treated -- as serious and responsible journalists so often exhibit extremely poor judgment in what they pass along because they are so eager to be "first" and to be heralded as the Most Well-Connected One. As a result, what passes as "news" and is treated as such is nothing more valuable than Drudge-like chatter between self-regarding Beltway mavens who are so impressed with their environment and themselves that they mistake their own gossip for news.
That might be tolerable in the low-level gossip sewers -- the Drudge Reports and the Pajamas Medias -- because at least, there, one knows what one is getting. But it should not be the standard of conduct that drives how organizations behave which want to be taken seriously as news sources. But as Mark Halperin and the Politico's own John Harris invaluably admitted, the line between what Drudge does and what they do is almost non-existent. In fact, it is Drudge who rules their world (Mike Allen's recent obsequious behavior with Drudge demonstrates exactly the same thing). And Drudge's supremacy over their world is quite evident in what they produce and how they behave, as illustrated by the gossipy "news reports" this week from The Politico's Smith and Allen.
The real problem is that conduct like this completely erodes confidence in what is being reported. A rational person ends up concluding that they are reading uncorroborated, unreliable gossip, and not news of any kind.
An editor at Salon asked me this week if I would write an article about Gonzales' resignation once it was announced. I replied that I would consider doing so to be a joyous occasion, but that I did not think it would happen. Bush does not fire his loyal aides under pressure.
Significantly, the fact that The Politico reported otherwise on Monday did not affect my view in the slightest, because I discount stories like that all the time because they are so often wrong. Having people reflexively assume that what they are reading is unreliable should be viewed as a major problem for journalists. Is it? It doesn't seem to be.
Maybe the Politico is designed to be a gossip rag -- like Drudge or right-wing blogs -- not an actual news organization. If so, that's fine. Gossip rags have a long and storied tradition and, as long as they are seen as what they are, can, I suppose, be entertaining. But if that's the case, it ought not to be treated as anything other than that. And organizations which want to be more than gossip rags ought to refrain from passing on unreliable, speculative whispers from their friends (their "sources") as though it is news.
UPDATE: Tim Grieve has an excellent post on The Politico's problems this week, and notes that when Jim VandeHei and John Harris left The Washington Post to start The Politico, they "vowed to put together 'the best political reporting team in country today and deliver the news the way people want it: fast, fair and first.'" And that is exactly how their reports are treated. As Grieve notes, this morning "CNN was passing along its faulty scoop about Edwards."
But I want to emphasize that while The Politico's reliance on gossip and speculation is particularly evident, they are hardly alone. If one watches cable news television programs, a substantial portion of the chatter is devoted to passing along Beltway gossip in the form of news, usually without identifying it as such. That has the effect of completely blurring the lines between news, speculation and rank gossip, and it begins to render media reports unreliable and worthless.
UPDATE II: How our media works:
Step 1: Drudge prominently issues the Media Theme for the Week:
Step 2: Right-wing Bush-following sites such as National Review and Instapundit -- fueled by GOP Hill staffers -- dutifully recite it.
Step 3: The Politico -- with Drudge fans like John Harris and Mike Allen steering the ship -- publishes bolstering stories to promote the theme: "Nancy Pelosi's honeymoon is over . . . Pelosi may have overestimated her influence with her ideological allies." And this one:
House Democrats pulled a bill to grant voting rights to Washington, D.C., after Republicans offered a motion that would repeal the gun ban for the District.Mark Halperin and John Harris made the single most revealing admission about the media in the last decade. It's the world Drudge rules -- from the mouths of the GOP to Drudge to right-wing hacks to the national media -- over and over and over (and things like this change nothing).The move is a clear signal that Democrats have lost control of House floor after minority Republicans presented the Democratic majority with a politically unpalatable motion that their conservative members would be forced to support for fear of angering the gun rights community.
He then recounts how one of these sources -- someome to whom Smith "sent a chatty, half-hearted email" -- responded and told him that Edwards would suspend the campaign, and Smith, after speaking with his editor, ran with it. That is how "Beltway journalism" so often works.
And then:
The Politico put it on our front page, Matt Drudge headlined it with a siren, and I almost instantly spoke to reporters from three radio shows, telling them what I knew: That a source had told me Edwards would suspend his campaign. . . .Once Matt Drudge linked it and television picked it up, there was no space to refine the reporting as it went along, and I should have known that.It is really amazing, and quite significant, just how frequently Drudge and The Politico end up being linked in so many ways. And when one considers the fact that The Politico is comprised of the most insider Beltway political reporters (how long before Mark Halperin shows up there?), that multi-layered connection really speaks volumes about how the whole rotted system works and how it has worked for some time.
UPDATE IV
: "Total chaos" in the House:Looks like Pelosi did it:That's some "loss of control." So that buries this week's Drudge-led media theme. On to the next one.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies in the House now appear to have the Democratic votes necessary to pass the measure that requires American combat troops to be out of Iraq by Fall 2008 at the latest.Three House liberal leaders have just announced that they are "letting go" of their nominal underlings in the Progressive and Out of Iraq caucuses, meaning that they will not pressure them to vote "nay" on the grounds that the bill continues funding the war b
That might be just enough to put Pelosi over the top with the 218 votes she needs for passage. . . . This is easily the biggest test to date of her leadership.
-- Glenn Greenwald
