Getting It First

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 17, 2006 11:09 AM

It's hammered into every aspiring reporter's head from the first day on the college paper or at J-school: There's nothing better than beating the pants off the competition.

And it's basically the reigning ethos in the news biz today, especially since the industry tends to attract highly competitive folks.

But is it time to rethink the scoop mentality?

The second-by-second approach you sometimes see played out on cable TV can clearly be counterproductive, when everyone shouts "the miners are alive!" without having the facts nailed down. But what about newspapers and magazines? In an age of real-time blogging, does it make sense for them to handle some stories with the utmost secrecy?

Consider this post from Business Week's Stephen Baker

"I've been leading a secret life on this blog. For months and months I worked on this math cover story. I was talking to mathematicians and people who use math, and it was dominating my thinking. It was in many ways the most interesting thing going on--and I couldn't blab about it in the blog."

(He also added this peek behind the curtain: In an attempt to be blog-like, "I wrote a first draft in first person. Some people liked it, some didn't, but I'm sure they all agreed that it didn't read like a traditional BW story. The top editors said, in effect, nice try. But they wanted the traditional approach: Less me, more clarity.")

That led to a long rant, at Buzz Machine world headquarters, by Jeff Jarvis :

"Is it better for Steve and Business Week to have held back their story from public view until it was packaged and polished and delivered in print, or to have sought out the best advice on it from an informed public by seeking collaboration via Steve's blog as the story was being formed? Which produces a better product and a better business?

"Of course, the magazine vets would say that they could not possibly let the world know about such a megastory because then the competitors would steal the scoop. How silly of me even to ask. But what competitors: US Weekly? And if Fortune came along and did its mondomath story, at least colleagues in the business would know it was a ratty thing to do, stealing from Steve's blog, indicating they didn't have ideas of their own.

"If publications shared what they were working on and if the practice succeeded in improving stories -- and, indeed, in drumming up excitement for them -- then they'd all end up doing this and all would fear being stolen from. Honor among hacks.

"The bigger question is whether there is value left in the scoop. As good as it is, will that math story really drive extra newsstand sales (no matter how much Steve tried to get them to sex it up)?

"Or is the essence of a magazine -- and its strength in a world where content has been dethroned by connections -- that it is about an ongoing relationship with a public that shares interests? Obviously -- except for the aforementioned US and other outlets of bodily fluids journalism -- I'd vote for the latter. Perhaps it is better to create the means for that community of shared interests, needs, and expertise to improve stories and gain and share knowledge. Perhaps it is better to make magazines less of a product and more of a process, less of a subscription to a thing and more of a membership to a community. Stop me before I go too far. Oh, too late.

"Now let's ask, what is the value of the scoop in the more timely media of newspaper and broadcast? Do scoops really drive the business? Or do they stoke the ego? Here, too, I'll vote for the latter."

My reaction: Easy for Jeff to say. In today's wired world, letting slip that you're working on a competitive story would lead to an immediate rip-off: by other publications, by bloggers, by talk radio hosts, you name it. Worse, they would steal your story--or just talk it to death--without benefit of the careful research you did or the nuances you've mastered. More often than not, it would be a cartoon version. Then critics and bloggers would start ripping your work before it's even been published , and the partisans denouncing you for even attempting to investigate such-and-such if it's perceived as negative to their side.

No thanks.

Quick example: Back in 1999, word leaked that NBC had interviewed Juanita Broaddrick, an Arkansas woman accusing President Bill Clinton of a sexual assault. When the network held the story--until after the Senate acquitted Clinton, as it turned out--it was hammered by the right for covering up for the president. Whether NBC's decision was right or wrong, few cared at the time whether the network felt the story was solid enough to broadcast. The act of not publishing became the story.

Sure, some "scoops" are silly: getting hold of a report a few hours before it's released or something like that. But for a detailed story on which you've done considerable homework, I'd rather present the world with the finished product and then let everyone have at it. Even if it means that Jeff Jarvis and his cyber-brethren have to wait a bit longer.

The New York Times is still all over the NSA, with this rare, four-byline story:

"In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

"But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

"F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy."

Translation: They spied like crazy, ignored the rules and still came up empty.

Al Gore , by the way, says Bush broke the law, "repeatedly and insistently": "Former Vice President Al Gore, charging that President Bush's record on civil liberties posed a 'grave danger' to America's constitutional freedoms, on Monday urged the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Bush's authorization of warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency."

If you were out and about over the weekend, you may have missed my piece about the attempted Swift-Boating of Jack Murtha over the Purple Hearts he won in Vietnam.

The New Republic agrees with National Review that the Abramoff mess belongs in the GOP's corner:

"Republicans have retreated to a second line of defense--namely, construing the scandal as broadly as possible. The problem shouldn't be confined to those members of Congress and staffers with whom Abramoff had a close relationship. It should be expanded to include everybody who received money from anyone who ever dealt with Abramoff. Suddenly, what do you know: It's a bipartisan scandal! As President Bush put it last month, Abramoff 'was an equal money dispenser . . . [H]e was giving money to people in both political parties.'

"Unfortunately, this second line of defense has taken root in the news media, which is always eager, in the spirit of evenhandedness, to attribute equal blame for any problem to both parties. A couple of examples provide the flavor of such coverage. The Washington Post reported last month that, while 'Democrats are hoping to capitalize on Republican ethical woes,' prominent Democrats 'were among beneficiaries of the largest campaign contributions from Abramoff's associates and clients.' Dan Abrams of MSNBC asked, 'It does seem most of his connections were to Republicans, but there are some Democrats who've had connections with him as well, right?'

"The hilarity of this is that, before he became a figure of disgrace, nobody who knew the faintest thing about Abramoff wondered about his partisan affiliation. Abramoff came into politics alongside GOP operatives like Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist in the College Republicans, and he shared their total-war mentality . . . Abramoff thrived precisely because he recognized something that the Washington press corps still seems unable to: that the Republican Party's alliance with K Street made it deeply and thoroughly corruptible."

Not to mention that Black Hat Jack served on Bush's transition team.

Speaking of Abramoff, what an embarrassment for the magazine biz. Slate's Tim Noah explains:

"Imagine, for a moment, that you are the Magazine Publishers of America. You want to fight a planned increase in postal rates that would hurt business by raising your fixed costs. You hire the lobby firm Preston Gates, among whose most valuable assets is an influence-peddling wunderkind named Jack Abramoff. As part of a multipronged strategy, Abramoff decides that $25,000 might help persuade a high-ranking aide to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay named Tony Rudy to help stop the postal rate increase. Simply to hand Rudy $25,000 in cash would be a tad obvious, so Abramoff decides to pay Rudy's wife Lisa. The question then becomes: What pretext can be found for paying Lisa the money? . . .

"This is Abramoff's specialty. He has relationships with many philanthropic organizations that boil down to this: I will bankroll you if you will launder my bribes . . .

"Abramoff bundles the payment from the Magazine Publishers of America with another payment from a company seeking state contracts to run online lotteries; he gives the money to Toward Tradition; and Toward Tradition, on Abramoff's 'recommendation,' hires Lisa Rudy to plan some event. Everybody wins."

Read the whole thing.

Michael O'Hare at Reality-Based Community offers this pronouncement on Sam Alito:

"He doesn't have a screw loose; what he has is a piece missing, conspicuously, radiantly, displaying the absence of any sense of, well, justice. Not a case came up for discussion in which he registered that one or another outcome was just wrong, outrageous to a sense of decency, or to him. He's on record in a memo as believing that to shoot an eighth-grader, known not to be armed, who was trying to climb over a fence in escape, is a proper use of deadly force by a policeman. In a discussion of immigration cases that have been regularly occasioning inexcusable, vile, un-American heartbreak on people who missed obscure deadlines or violated arcane requirements, all he could say was that the courts get bad transcripts and it was hard to find translators for some of the plaintiffs, but that was a problem for Congress. It wasn't exactly Pilate washing his hands, but the man appears to be completely comfortable dealing with frightful social wrongs by moving the issue down the hall to another office . . . A smart, decent, small man."

Slate's Meghan O'Rourke tackles the question: Should nonfiction books be true?

"Long before his book was exposed as fraudulent, the James Frey phenomenon was itself Display A of what has become a deep-seated conviction of our therapeutic culture: Not only is the line between what is factually true and what is purveyed as 'authentic' blurry indeed, but the inspirational power of a work of imagination or memory is the most relevant currency by which to judge its value. Frey's manuscript entered the market as a document whose fate rode more on its packaging than on the artistic merits of its prose, perception, or plot. He peddled Pieces to publishers as a novel, and, when that didn't work, he was content to sell it as memoir in the hopes of capitalizing on the allure of confessional revelation . . .

"The fact is, doubts were raised about the accuracy of Frey's memoir from the start, both in reviews and in cocktail party chatter. And people have long believed that LeRoy was, in some fashion, the invention of another writer. So who is now shocked, shocked that dissembling is going on here? Not Doubleday, which continues to endorse its author. Not Oprah, if you caught her call-in during James Frey's exclusive interview with Larry King this week, to tell viewers that the 'underlying message of redemption in James Frey's memoir still resonates with me, and I know it still resonates with millions of other people who will read this book.' It was a perfectly scripted 'unscripted' media moment. Her message summed up the reigning ethos, in which the once-opposed cultural vocabularies of therapeutic authenticity and postmodern subjectivity fuse: If a book moves you, it's true."

Well, the next time someone accuses me of mangling the facts, I'll just say it's all about the underlying message.

Did the Mainstream Media take a pass on these sickening remarks by Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky because they were so distasteful? Ann Althouse has the details on his analysis of Condi Rice:

"Speaking with Pravda this week, Zhirinovsky chastised Rice for calling on Russia to 'act responsibly' in supplying natural gas to Ukraine. The fascistic pol attributed that 'coarse anti-Russian statement' to Rice being 'a single woman who has no children.' 'If she has no man by her side at her age, he will never appear,' Zhirinovsky ranted on. 'Condoleezza Rice needs a company of soldiers. She needs to be taken to barracks where she would be satisfied. Condoleezza Rice is a very cruel, offended woman who lacks men's attention,' he added. 'Such women are very rough.'"

What would Putin do if this joker said that about a prominent Russian woman?

This sounds like a parody, but Wonkette claims the following personal ad was posted on Craigslist:

"You: Tall (about 6'1"), dark/floppy-haired reporter -- radio or TV, apparently -- dressed casually, smiling and glancing at me as we have seemed to pass each other in the hallways of Hart, Dirksen and Russell all week during the Alito hearings.

"Me: Print reporter, shorter (5'8"), blondish-brown hair, wearing suit and tie all week, smiling at you every time we pass each other. This afternoon, we finally said 'hi,' just outside the coffee shop in Russell.

"That's where we first saw each other before the hearings on Tuesday -- you were behind me in line. Have seen you at least once every day since.

"Are we flirting with each other? If so, we should do it over lunch or coffee."

I never realized the Alito hearings were such a meat market.