BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
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See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Adam Nagourney responds.
New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney, who yesterday
exposed
Stephanie Cutter of the John Kerry campaign as the author of an
anti-Dean e-mail despite Cutter's demand that the contents of her
message be reported as "background," has responded to Media Log's
item
on the flap.
Nagourney writes:
The Kerry people e-mailed
me a copy of your item about my story.
Feel free to call or e-mail any
time. I would have told you what I told Stephanie: I'm more than
happy to let a campaign aide go off the record, or on background.
But it's a two-way street: we've got to negotiate the rules in
advance. This is pretty basic: I do this a dozen times a day with
campaign officials.
But in my book, you can't fire
off an e-mail and demand preemptively that it be taken on
background and attributed to a "dem campaign," which is what
Stephanie did. That is particularly true in a case where one
campaign is ATTACKING the other. If other reporters want to agree
to that, fine. But I don't think it's fair, and I'm not going to
agree to those terms.
What made this case particularly
striking was that this was an e-mail sent out to a BUNCH of
reporters. And Stephanie was asking us to provide the Kerry
campaign cover while she attacked the Dean campaign for the same
thing that many of her colleagues were attacking Dean for on
record. That doesn't strike me as right.
A couple of
observations:
1. The scenario Nagourney describes
is something I identified yesterday as one of the possible
explanations. His e-mail to me confirms it, and I think he was
justified in not going along with Cutter's request.
2. Readers increasingly are
demanding transparency. I would have liked to see him stick in a
sentence yesterday explaining this to everyone rather than leaving
the average Times subscriber scratching her head.
Little People: the
Salon interview. Salon has posted a long
Q&A
(sub. req.) with me on my book, Little
People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter's
Eyes. The interviewer
is Lisa Hedley, a documentarian
and the mother of a girl with dwarfism.
posted at 8:19 AM |
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link
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
