SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS

FAR FROM THE BEST POLITICAL REPORTING OF 2008

By Chris Daly


I realize that the train has pretty much left the station on the Times/McCain story. But I wanted to wait to let the whole life-cycle of such a piece unfold before commenting. Now we can see (or infer) the process in something like its journalistic fullness:

--concocting the story line
--reporting it
--editing it
--sitting on it
--hearing footsteps of someone reporting about your reporting
--publishing the story.
--getting criticized for it
--following up in the news pages, while at the same time…
--sending Executive Editor Bill Keller out to defend it.
--commenting on the whole thing by the ombud... er, Public Editor.



One easy issue: the “romance” angle. It may have happened, but you cannot tell from this article. They simply didn’t nail it down. When that happens, there is an inevitable choice to make: keep reporting, or give it up. It is not an option, especially on the front page during a presidential election season, to say, “What the hell? Let’s go with what we’ve got and hope for the best.”
This was an embarrassing journalistic failure, one that begins with the reporters but certainly extends up the food chain to all the editors who have a hand in Page 1 stories. The story violated the paper’s own rules on sourcing, as well as common journalistic standards and common sense.

One sub-issue raised by the reporting on the “relationship” has to do with the competencies of sources. Not all sources are alike. Not all sources are competent to help us get at the truth of things. In this case, (never mind the anonymity for the moment), the sources were cited as experiencing “waves of anxiety” about WHETHER the boss was having an affair. The narrow and not-terribly-interesting question was their state of mind, and they can be reliably quoted on that topic. They are, after all, experts on their own feelings.

But those sources are not NECESSARILY experts on the truth or falsity of the things they were worried about. For the broader and more interesting factual question of whether there was an affair, the Times needed a different kind of source, or better yet, some hard evidence. In other words, it’s not enough to just have a source; the source has to know what he or she is talking about.

As to the anonymity: that’s always a judgment call, but in this case, it must be said that it would have been a whole lot better to have sources on the record, or to just bag the whole project. To quote a brief passage from the Times’ own lengthy (and admirable) policy on confidential sources:

In any situation when we cite anonymous sources, at least some readers may suspect that the newspaper is being used to convey tainted information or special pleading.

Predictably, the “romance” angle has blotted out the rest of the sky. The main theme of the story – that the righteous John McCain has blinders when it comes to his own public ethics – is an important one. If the Times had started with the Keating 5 and stuck with the abundant on-the-record material about McCain, they could have put together a solid (i.e., un-sexy) story on a serious issue. As it is, they just made McCain (and a lot of other people) mad for no good reason.

As Machiavelli warned: “If you would strike at a Prince, you must kill him.”