COMM 209 -- on the record, off the record

Cute story in media critic Howard Kurtz' column this morning in The Washington Post. It's about Vice President Richard Cheney's difficulty in staying "off the record" with the traveling press during his recent trip to Asia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

First, a definition. Reporters often take information from their sources off the record, which means they don't attribute it to them by name. A variation on the convention is taking information "on background." It's tricky, and it very swiftly leads to ethical problems because the reporters are keeping a secret (the name) from their readers. But it's done all the time, and we couldn't gather news without it. Here's Kurtz' account of what happened:

The reporters traveling with Vice President Cheney as he flew from Afghanistan to Oman yesterday were granted an interview with someone who would be identified only as a "senior administration official." But the official's identity would not remain a state secret for long.

"Let me just make one editorial comment here," the SAO said about the vice president's talks with Pakistan's leader. "I've seen some press reporting says, 'Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.' That's not the way I work. I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing, or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business."

The SAO also said that "I was very careful" in choosing words to criticize House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Iraq strategy.

The first-person pronoun gave away the game. But it also raised the question: Why did Cheney feel the need to speak on a not-for-attribution basis, and why did the seven journalists on the trip go along?

So Kurtz did what any reporter would do under the circumstances. He got on the phone to find out why.

Lee Anne McBride, Cheney's press secretary, could not, under the ground rules, confirm the obvious. But, she said, "it was important to provide the press and public with briefings on these meetings, and it was determined that a more comprehensive readout could be provided on a background basis."

Administration officials concluded that, for diplomatic reasons, Cheney could not publicly discuss private conversations with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

That's reasonable. It's how diplomacy works. It's also how journalism works. Some kinds of news just wouldn't ever reach the public if it weren't for "off-the-record" or "background" conventions.

Kurtz also asked the reporters why they went along with it.

Mark Silva, a Chicago Tribune reporter who made the trip, was among those pressing Cheney's staff for an on-the-record briefing, saying the vice president has been elected twice.

"At the start of our meeting with a senior administration official, in which he advised us that he insisted this talk be on background, we asked him, too, to go on the record," Silva said. Cheney agreed to be identified only while discussing the suicide bombing at Bagram air base in Afghanistan that occurred while he was there.

Silva credited the White House with releasing an accurate transcript despite numerous "I" references. "But it's also a measure of how absurd the entire business of speaking as an SAO is."

That about sums it up. At least in this case. I would never, ever tell my opinion of Vice President Cheney. At least not in public. But I can tell you that I know a journalism instructor who thinks Cheney (or whoever the SAO might have been, with a wink and a nod) was abusing the process when he went off on that "editorial comment" of his.