Naked, unbridled scooplust at WaPo!
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Monday, April 4, 2005
Blogging in Print: According to de facto MSM Damage Controller Howie Kurtz, WaPo's Mike Allen is apparently now admitting what has been obvious to everyone else who has followed the controversy over those alleged "GOP Talking Points": the Post's stories were not entirely "accurate and carefully worded" (Kurtz's words), nor is it true that Allen "stuck to what we knew to be true and did not call them talking points or a Republican memo." Instead, he let an early version of his story ship out containing the unsupported claim that the memo was "distributed to Republican senators by party leaders."...
Obviously at some point Allen thought or assumed the memo was a GOP leadership document, and before he'd nailed that down he temporarily let his scooplust get the better of him. This is a perfectly forgivable mistake. At least I hope it is--I make it all the time. You get all excited thinking you have a great story and then when you think more about it you realize you have a not-quite-as-great story, so you go back and make it "carefully worded"! ...
The problem is that the MSM is now claiming that it's somehow better at balancing the urge to scoop with the need to check than non-MSM writers. As cartoonish LAT credential-snob David Shaw put it:
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When I or virtually any other mainstream journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced [editors] will have examined this column, for example. They will have checked it for accuracy, fairness, grammar, taste and libel, among other things.
If I'm careless — if I am guilty of what the courts call a "reckless disregard for the truth" — The Times could be sued for libel … and could lose a lot of money. With that thought — as well as our own personal and professional commitments to accuracy and fairness — very much in mind, I and my editors all try hard to be sure that what appears in the paper is just that, accurate and fair.
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In contrast, Shaw says,
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"Many bloggers — not all, perhaps not even most — don't seem to worry much about being accurate. Or fair. They just want to get their opinions — and their "scoops" — out there as fast as they pop into their brains.
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What the Allen incident shows is that credentialed MSM reporters are under just as much "scoop" pressure as bloggers--maybe more pressure, since they must meet to a set of rigid deadlines, with demands (in Allen's case) not only from the reporter's own paper but from all the other papers that subscribe to his paper's news service, not to mention all those apparently ineffective editor-checkers who are waiting around to go home. Because bloggers don't have these rigid corporate deadlines, they may actually find it easier to balance the "scoop" imperative with the "check" imperative--if a story hasn't checked out, they can just wait an hour or two. (Although, in Allen's non-defense, he wasn't reacting instantaneously to a breaking event. He had more than a day to nail down Linda Douglass' initial report of the memo but apparently hadn't by the time his first report shipped.) ...
Second blogging advantage: if you don't know the truth, you can usually at least ask a question. "Was this memo distributed by the Republican party leadership or just some ham-handed lobbyist--or is it maybe a plant?" That's a trick an MSM reporter like Allen typically can't get away with. Why? I don't know. It would help frame the issue for readers if journalists routinely asked such questions, and they'd get answers by return email. But it might destroy the veneer of MSM omniscience. More important, in the case of the Schiavo memo, honestly revealing how little Allen knew of the memo's provenance would have drained much of the interest from his story--which depended for its bite largely on the unsupported impression it gave to the casual reader that this was, in fact, a GOP leadership memo. "Careful" wording is a form of deception if it serves mainly to gull those who don't give a careful reading. ...
Update: Powerline notes that Allen's initial published report also said:
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Republican officials declared, in a memo that was supposed to be seen only by senators, that they believe the Schiavo case "is a great political issue"...
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Yes, it was a great story, that first draft. ... 2:47 P.M.
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