Patterico's Pontifications

8/13/2005

Seebach on Hewitt’s Demand and the Roberts Investigation

Filed under: Judiciary,Media Bias — Patterico @ 8:59 am



Regular readers will remember that Rocky Mountain News columnist and editorial writer Linda Seebach recently wrote me, to criticize Hugh Hewitt’s demand that journalists who wish to interview him about John Roberts do so on his radio show, live. I published her comments in this post. I further explained that Seebach’s views appear to largely square with my own, since I understand journalists’ desire to keep their interviews under wraps before publication — but not the insistence of some that their interviews not be taped at all.

Seebach has expanded her comments into a column for her paper. She kindly mentions this blog in the column, for which I thank her. She also includes in the mix a defense of a hypothetical investigation of the adoption records of a Supreme Court nominee’s children:

[A]s lawyers know, exploring hypotheticals is often fruitful, so let’s explore this one a bit fu[r]ther – not talking about Hewitt and Roberts, now, about but some hypothetical important nominee and his former colleague who is now a prominent radio personality.

Suppose the reporter has received a credible tip that there was something dodgy about the adoption of the nominee’s twin Chinese daughters. Perhaps a former paralegal at the law office that handled the adoption alleges that the parents bribed someone and the radio host would know.

That should be checked out. If true, it is definitely a story, no matter how awkward for the children. If false, it should be quietly buried, which it can’t be if it is being broadcast.

And suppose the hypothetical radio host knows, or believes, that the allegations are true. What’s he going to say when asked live, on the air? He might not have been expecting that question.

Seebach then poses a number of other hypotheticals:

Or, suppose he has heard the rumors, but believes they were started by a disgruntled former paralegal who was fired on suspicion of dealing cocaine in the lunchroom. What’s he going to say about that? If she was charged and convicted, maybe he’d say so, but otherwise, probably not.

And – human relationships being endlessly messy – suppose that is what he believes, but in fact the paralegal is innocent and was framed by her boss, the real dealer.

And suppose her boss is actually the on-air host’s mistress. Or his secret gay lover. Who is blackmailing him. (Wave hypothetical flag again.)

Most stories aren’t like that. But sometimes they are, and perhaps the paper got badly burned on one of them a while back, and so now it has a policy. In which case, the reporter’s refusal may have nothing to do with the nominee at all.

There are two points I’d like to make here.

First: I agree with Seebach’s point that secrecy during the course of a journalistic investigation may not only protect the reporter’s scoop, but can also aid in the discovery of the truth — and the suppression of falsehoods. This is an insightful point.

And it is consistent with my proposal in the postscript to my original post on Hewitt’s suggestion: Hugh should simply agree not to run the interview live, but reserve the right to tape and broadcast the interview after the journalist’s story ran. If the interview ended up unnecessarily repeating some libel, Hugh could choose not to run it, and no rational person would blame him. But if the journalist left out critical facts favorable to Roberts, Hugh could bust them.

There is no excuse for a journalist to object to that. And I know Seebach agrees.

Second: Seebach’s column is not necessarily a defense of the New York Times‘s attempt to unseal adoption records as part of a routine background check. But I am curious to know what she thinks about that.

I continue to believe that the Times‘s actions were an inappropriate invasion of privacy. Conducting such an investigation based upon a credible tip, without attempting to gain access to sealed records, would present a different question, in my opinion.

I have written Ms. Seebach to invite her to address the non-hypothetical issue of the New York Times‘s actions in the comments, if she wishes.

4 Responses to “Seebach on Hewitt’s Demand and the Roberts Investigation”

  1. I was going to send you a link, Patterico, but you were ahead of me! Thanks for the link (and I’ll send you a permalink to the archives once it’s assigned).

    If you sent the message you refer to to my office e-mail, could you resend it here? Otherwise, I’ll answer from there on Monday.

    We ran a short editorial today on Air America, alluding with mild snarkiness to the Times’ dillydallying, because I regularly read Michelle Malkin’s blog (she’s a friend and a former colleague from the Los Angeles Daily News) and knew about the NYT story. I wish we’d done it sooner, because then we’d get to brag, but the fact is that we have only about a dozen slots for editorials in a week, we prefer to devote them to local issues, and Air America is not a local issue in Denver.

    I did not, as it happens, see the AP story, or even know there was one. Fridays are very busy in my department, because we have weekend pages to do, and the later in the afternoon it gets, the less chance I have to check the AP wire, even though I have a direct AP feed at my desk.

    Such a trifling point is hardly worth mention, except that it speaks to some of the more peculiar conspiracy theories out there. Comments often seem to assume that a newspaper (or for that matter, the entire mainstream media) is some kind of vast hive mind, acting with concerted effort to bring about the queen’s will.

    Papers aren’t like that. No big hierarchical organization is like that. Instead, there are a great many people working at highly specialized jobs, guided in part by some broad corporate principles, but interpreting them according to their own worldviews, circumstances and principles.

    Some comment I saw, can’t remember where, opined that the NYT was holding its story on Air America but when it saw that the AP was going to move a story, decided to put its own on the Web.

    But the NYT doesn’t DO anything, except by the same rhetorical figure of speech that allows the White House to issue statements. People at the Times do and decide, and given how big the Times is, the people
    who wrote/edited the Times’ own story probably don’t even know the people who deal with wire copy. Maybe don’t even know who they are.

    Sure, there must be an editor somewhere on the organizational chart with nominal responsibility for both these subdepartments, because that’s how hierarchies work. But the higher up someone is on the chart, the less likely it is that he knows enough about a single story to reach down several layers and direct how it is to be covered. These people are busy.

    linda seebach (82adcb)

  2. Linda, first of all, I’d like to know why, in this hypothetical situation, the reporter see him or herself and the interview as the only possible legitimate source of information?

    Would the reporter’s presence make the radio host’s allegations seem more likely to be true? Would you seriously expect a radio host, when confronted with a scandal he believes to be true, to keep quiet anyway? Even the worst case scenario, the tangled web you give, the radio host has the same incentive to tell the exact same story the next afternoon.

    Oh, and as to the New York Times conspiracy theory issue, well, I find it likely that an editor would notice when a major story comes through on the wire and the paper isn’t covering it. I find it possible that a reporter would keep up enough of the news to have subscriptions to a couple wire services. For the NYT – or even a person at the NYT – to have written a story because they saw it breaking on other services doesn’t take a whole department or a top editor. It just takes one smuck pointing out an e-mail to an editor that previously thought the scandal was just ‘right wing noise’.

    I’ve seen this done, so don’t tell me it’s impossible.

    blueeyes (85e0cf)

  3. Of course, the journalists at a big paper have access to all the wire services the paper subscribes to; what we usually don’t have is time to read them, except as pertinent to something we’re actually working on.

    Yes, it is possible for a reporter (which I’m not, by the way) to alert editors to some item that might be of interest, and I do that occasionally. But if it doesn’t happen, the reason may be entirely unrelated to the content of the item, let alone its perceived political implications.

    Why wouldn’t the radio host air a scandal? Still hypothetically: he was a party to it. Or his equally hypothetical wife was. Or he believes it to be true, but he isn’t perfectly certain, and if it turns out to be false, he’s on the hook for a slander judgment. He’s working on the same story himself and waiting for the clincher.

    I don’t understand the premise of your first question.

    linda seebach (8b2bc8)

  4. I’m saying that, if you were to interview a talk show host off the air, and he revealed some horrifying truth, wouldn’t he want to reveal it again? If he was a party to it, or his hypothetical wife was, there’s no reason he’d want to tell a reporter. Even if the radio show host simply was working on the same story and believes it to be true but fears slander (a hard to prove charge, particularly if he, well, believes it to be true – American defamation laws are incredibly friendly to free speech), by waiting until after an interview, he could argue that he heard it from the reporter. After all, the reporter planted the suspicion. In fact, any reason that would make him not want to tell common audiences would be damn good reasons not to tell you.

    blueeyes (85e0cf)


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