Archive for the &;Hilary-Clinton-monster&; Category
Obama Aide Learns There&;s No &;Off theRecord&;
March 11, 2008
No. As professor and writer Samantha Powers found out last week, you can&;t do it. There is no off the record.
Powers, an adviser to Barack Obama, was quoted in The Scotsman as saying of the Hilary Clinton campaign &;They&;re obsessed&;she&;s a monster..and that&;s off the record.&; That late defense didn&;t work; she ended up resigning from the campaign and apologizing. Her unfortunate but newsworthy comment also overwhelmed Powers&; actual agenda&;to use the press to promote her new book.
As a media trainer for many international companies, &;everything you say is on the record&; is a key point I try to pound home with impressionable young product managers and less-impressionable, &;know-it-all&; senior management. They blanch when I tell them, &;If you&;re drinking with a journalist until 3AM at a Las Vegas trade show, anything he remembers will be on the Web the next day.&;
If you are going to talk to the press, understand they&;ll use your quotes if they&;re interesting. And don&;t expect to be able to take back your words; if Powers had called Hilary a &;monster&; on live television, whether she took it back or not, there&;s no doubt that it would be on the record.
When Tucker Carlson challenged Scotsman reporter Gerri Peev for not heeding Powers&; plea to ignore her &;monster&; comment, Gerri Peev asked, &;Are you really that acquiescent in the United States? In the United Kingdom, journalists believe that on or off the record is a principle that&;s decided ahead of the interview.&;
Carlson may be right when he implies the UK press would sell out its mother to get a story. Cutting their teeth chasing royals, the Brits are bolder. When I worked at the National Enquirer (and made the near-fatal mistake of trying to keep up drinking with them) the unofficial motto seemed to be &;if you need some shit get a Brit&;.
But while Peev may seem like a nasty piece of work, she&;s just a tough-minded journalist &;If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that your journalists aren&;t doing a very good job of getting to the truth.&;
That elusive truth is what journalists dig for. And that&;s why there&;s no such thing as &;off the record.&;
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