FOR TUESDAY, DUNAWAY CH. 4 AND FIRST WRITING ASSIGNMENT. DC PROGRAM PRESENTATION AT THE END OF TODAY'S CLASS.
Info-tainment (Dunaway 98-99)
Getting Information
- Statements and releases
- Public Records
- Interviews: the usual suspects. Sometimes they go bad for the interviewee. Sometimes the interviewee deflects.
- Crowdsourcing: or how David Farenthold won the Pulitzer
- Leaks
- “The Ego Leak” -- Giving information primarily to satisfy a sense of self-importance.
- “The Goodwill Leak” -- A play for a future favor: The primary purpose is to accumulate credit with a reporter, which the leaker hopes can be spent at a later date.
- “The Policy Leak” -- A straightforward pitch for or against a proposal using some document or insiders’ information as the lure to get more attention than might be otherwise justified. The great leaks, such as the Pentagon papers in 1971, often fit this category.
- “The Animus Leak” -- Used to settle grudges. Information is disclosed to embarass another person.
- “The Trial-Balloon Leak” -- Revealing a proposal that is under consideration in order to assess its assets and liabilities.
- “The Whistle-Blower Leak” -- Unlike the others, usually employed by career personnel.
- Espionage leaks -- Information posted online by hostile intelligence services, often through intermediaries such as WikiLeaks. From the Mueller report:
- On July 27, 2016...candidate Trump made public statements that included the following: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”... Within approximately five hours of Trump’s statement, GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton’s personal office. ... In order to expand its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the GRU units transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and the chairman of the Clinton Campaign to WikiLeaks. GRU officers used both the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas to communicate with WikiLeaks through Twitter private messaging and through encrypted channels, including possibly through WikiLeaks’s private communication system
- Geek leaks -- Information posted on the Internet by geeks not working for Putin.
- Tips
- "On the Record," "Off the Record," "Background"
- In an internship or entry-level job, NEVER talk to the media without specific authorization from your boss.
When preparing for interviews, reporters sometimes consult with the interviewee's adversaries.
Case in point: In 1998, Rep. Henry Waxman discovered misconduct by Rep. Dan Burton, chair of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. To make Bill Clinton look guilty, an aide to Burton had doctored transcripts of a recording by jailed lawyer Webster Hubbell. We pick up the story from Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
Rather than issue a press release, Waxman devised something far more attention-grabbing and dramatic. The following Sunday, Burton was booked for an encore appearance on Meet the Press. The show’s host, Tim Russert, was quietly made aware of the discrepancy between the two sets of Hubbell transcripts.* On Sunday, when the cameras began rolling, Burton became an unwitting captive as Russert, the dean of Washington journalism and a maestro of the prosecutorial interview, confronted the chairman on air with evidence of the doctored transcripts. The uproar was immediate and intense. Gingrich, humiliated, condemned Burton’s committee as “the circus.” Republicans fumed at the embarrassment Burton had brought on them and demanded he atone for it. The Washington Post splashed the story across its front page: “Burton Apologizes to GOP.
* Political hit jobs like the one on Burton are always disguised in order not to divert focus away from the target. The public story of Russert's triumph, detailed afterward in New York magazine, was that Russert himself discovered the divergent transcripts. He did not. He was a fine journalist, but here he had some help.
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