Former U.S. President Bill Clinton thought he was talking to a civilian when he mouthed off about the author of an unflattering Vanity Fair article about him. Wrongo! The diatribe showed up on the Huffington Post.
PS: The reporter was a Barack Obama contributor. Welcome to the new normal.
The woman, Mayhill Fowler, who calls herself a citizen journalist, wore no credential around her neck and did not identify herself, her intentions or her affiliation as an unpaid contributor to Off the Bus, a section of The Huffington Post. While her digital audio recorder was visible in her left hand during that encounter last Monday, she says, she did not believe Mr. Clinton saw it. “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday.
The incident, widely mined on the cable news channels as fresh evidence of Mr. Clinton’s volcanic temper in the waning hours of his wife’s presidential campaign, has prompted an entirely different discussion — this one among political reporters, journalism teachers, public relations strategists and bloggers themselves — about the dos and don’ts of ethical reporting in the YouTube age.
Among the questions posed last week was this: in an era when anyone with a cellphone and wi-fi connection can make like Tom Brokaw, do the long-accepted conventions of engagement (like a reporter’s volunteering who she is without being asked) still apply?
“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Jonathan Alter, a columnist and political reporter for Newsweek, said in an interview. “If you don’t have trust, you don’t get good stories. If someone comes along and uses deception to shatter that trust, she has hurt the very cause of a free flow of public information that she claims she wants to assist.”
“You identify yourself when you’re interviewing somebody,” Mr. Alter added. “It’s just a form of cheating not to.”
But to Jane Hamsher, a onetime Hollywood producer who founded Firedoglake, a politics-oriented Web site that tilts left, Mr. Alter’s rules of the road are in need of repaving. For starters, she said, the onus was on Mr. Clinton to establish who Ms. Fowler was before deciding to speak as he did. That he failed to quiz her at all, Ms. Hamsher said, was Mr. Clinton’s problem, not Ms. Fowler’s. As a result, Ms. Hamsher said, the public got to experience the unplugged musings of a former president (and candidate’s spouse) in a way that might never have been captured on tape by an old boy on the bus like Mr. Alter.
“It’s hurting America that journalists consider their first loyalty to be to their subjects, and not to the people they’re reporting for,” she said. Told, for example, that the Times ethics policy states that “staff members should disclose their identity to people they cover (whether face to face or otherwise),” Ms. Hamsher was dismissive. In the context of political reporting, she said, such guidelines are intended to “protect this clubby group of journalists and their high-ranking political subjects, and keep access to themselves.”
“That,” she added, “is not the world we’re living in anymore.”
Ms. Fowler, it turns out, is the same person who used her status as a contributor to the campaign of Senator Barack Obama (something disclosed on the Huffington site) to gain access in April to an Obama fundraiser in San Francisco that the mainstream news media was not invited to. Here again, her digital recorder picked up an incendiary remark — Mr. Obama saying of some economically frustrated Pennsylvanians, “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”
Kelly McBride, leader of the ethics group at the Poynter Institute, a training center for print and television reporters (and more recently those online) said she saw merit in Ms. Fowler’s work, but cause for concern, too.
“On the one hand, when political candidates are so polished and put together, with their images so crafted for the rest of the universe, I think it’s good for democracy that it’s harder for them to maintain that because of citizen journalism,” Ms. McBride said. “But I also worry that as citizens take on the role of journalists, the amount of trickery will escalate — the sort of baiting of people and egging them on.”