Glenn Greenwald reports. I think Mr. Greenwald is being a little too uncharitable with Carlson Tucker though. It seems to me that it all depends on what the ground rules, stated and unstated, are. There’s a difference between an attempted claw-back in an all-inclusive free-form talk that Samantha Power was giving and a cozy mutual back-scratching relationship that develops between a political operator and a favored journalist. Tim Russert, it seems to me, is as much an opinionated entertainer as a journalist.
Question: An FT reporter told me that in the UK, “off the record” meant that you could write about it but couldn’t identify the source, and that if you didn’t want the reporter to write it at all, you had to say that it was “not for writing”. Is that still true? This was more than 15 years ago…
2 comments:
I believe the problem was that she made the comment, and then said it was off the record, not for attribution or somesuch. Obviously this should be the other way round.
Apparently, such things happen routinely and the US media will play along. I don't think that they'll let them get away with it in a formal press conference, though.
I know that such post facto off-the-record classification happens here too. I once did it myself (not as the principal, mind you) when I was a minder for foreign press relations. The journalist actually went along with it. It was in an informal setting, outside the formal event.
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