Nov 4, 2009 12:32 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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This morning, we published e-mails between New York Times reporters and Eliot Spitzer's flacks. Some commenters have suggested the post demonstrates a lack of familiarity with "journalism." Actually, we contacted the Times reporters for response, and a funny thing happened.
We invited both Danny Hakim and Jeremy Peters, the reporters whose e-mails to Spitzer and David Paterson flack Christine Anderson we published, to explain or defend themselves in our post. Both declined. They didn't refuse to talk to us—in fact, they each bent our ear for quite a while, occasionally loudly. But they refused, after repeated invitations, to grant us leave to memorialize their explanations, emendations, arguments, and defenses in the post. After the post went up, one of Hakim and Peters' colleagues at the Times sent us a (friendly) e-mail explaining what, in his view, was wrong with it. The first three words of the e-mail were, "off the record." Not long after that, we got another e-mail from a Times e-mail address that opened with, "this email is not for publication."
We won't violate their sourcing conditions. But we can say there has been a common theme in the responses so far, encapsulated by New York's Jessica Pressler, along the lines of: "So what? This is how it works." Indeed. What the e-mails do in fact demonstrate is that one of the ways in which journalism is traditionally practiced is that reporters communicate deferentially with flacks in an off-the-record capacity. That was kind of the point, and we understand that there are differing interpretations of the value of that sort of arrangement. For instance: We've never asked a flack for permission to call someone that we wanted to speak to, as Danny Hakim did when he wrote to Anderson, regarding David Paterson's former mistress, "Can we put out a call to her to see if she wants to talk?" We find that sort of request to be at odds with the Times' public image of itself as a titan of journalistic propriety and check on government malfeasance. But, as the e-mails we published clearly indicate, Anderson responded to Hakim's request with the ex-mistress' cell phone number, something that could have been quite helpful to him. So yes, he asked for permission. But he got what he wanted.
That is an interesting and valid argument, and may or may not have been made by people that we may or may not have talked to in the course of reporting the post. But for some reason, none of the people at the Times whose e-mails we published, or their colleagues who want to defend them, are willing to put their names on it. We suppose that there are perfectly good corporate reasons for Hakim and Peters and their defenders to refuse to speak on the record, and we actually love people who tell us things we want to know under cover of anonymity, which we routinely and freely grant to our sources, including Times staffers. But for employees of a newspaper whose sourcing policy begins, "readers of the New York Times demand to know as much as possible about where we obtain our information and why it merits their trust," it's just a strange way to go about reacting to the publication of undisputed documentary evidence of the way some Times reporters do their jobs, especially if there's ostensibly nothing noteworthy about those e-mails.
In any case—yes, we know a little bit about how journalism is done, and what Pressler calls the mundanely "deferential, even sycophantic" stance that many reporters take when it comes to "valuable sources," which in the case at hand means sources paid by the state of New York to manage those deferential and sycophantic reporters. And we're learning more about it as we continue to go through the 1,000 or so pages of e-mails we have left to go through.
Send an email to the author of this post at john@gawker.com.
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