The chief spin doctor

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 31, 1998 | by Susan Crabtree

MM: On that one he did. He called and let me know that was going to be in the book. He was reviewing the galleys in the final stages of publication and called and asked me about it. And I told him, "Howie, I just don't think that's what I said. I remember the episode generally and I may have a general idea of what I said -- it may have been something similar to that -- but it's not nearly as egregious as what you've got and there were other people who were there who would agree with me.

SC: Why do you think he went with the quote the way he had it originally, then?

MM: I think in part because he was already in galleys and it was going to be a bigger hassle to change it.

SC: How has the quote affected the relationship between White House officials and the press corps? Do you think he was wrong to use such an off-the-cuff, off-the-record comment?

MM: The obligation to protect off-the-record sourcing belongs to the reporter, not the source. And so if there was a reporter in that off-the-record setting who relayed that quote to him as he was reporting the book, I don't think you can fault Howie. But you sure can fault the reporter who violated ... the ground rules of whatever that discussion was on the plane.

I think that is a problem. Here's what the problem is: It's not that Howie Kurtz committed a cardinal sin by getting people to report information or conversations that were presumably off the record, I don't think that's an issue. The issue is some people clearly violated the spirit of the ground rules by speaking about those conversations to third parties.

But the larger issue :is a different one. As you can tell from his book, this is a hard relationship as it requires a lot of work to keep ... these relationships balanced on the side of professional respect and trust. Part of the way that happens is for people to declare ... at the end of the day after the stories are written and you're just sitting around having dinner or something ... it's off-hours. I'm not sure that's the case anymore. There's just been an increasing number of cases where the kind of socializing that's done among the press and the political community has crept into print: and it's made a lot of people, certainly a lot of people who work around here, wary of ... [what is considered] work and not pleasure or relaxing at the end of the day.

It makes it less likely that people are willing to sit back and shoot the breeze and talk candidly about what we're trying to do here. And that removes one avenue to get the kind of insights that good reporters want when they are reporting.

I sense a kind of dynamic where people are very wary of getting into these off-the-record sessions. A good example was the White House Correspondents' dinner, which is presumed to be, and in the past was presumed to have been, kind of an off-the-record session in which you socialize with the people that cover you on a day-to-day basis. I think everyone from the White House who went to that dinner ... saw it as part of their work and treated the conversations they had as being ... an interview.