A 61-year-old woman elbows her 5-foot-2-inch frame to the front of the crowd mobbing Bill Clinton after a campaign event in South Dakota. As Mr. Clinton shakes her hand and holds it tight, she deftly draws him into a response to an article on the Vanity Fair Web site that examines his post-presidential life. “Sleazy” and “slimy” are among the words that issue from the former president’s mouth. Within hours, audio of the three-minute exchange — including the woman’s description of the article as a “hatchet job,” and Mr. Clinton’s description of Todd Purdum, the author and a former reporter for The New York Times, as “dishonest” — is available for the world to hear on the Huffington Post Web site.
Which might have caught Mr. Clinton by surprise.
The woman, Mayhill Fowler, who calls herself a citizen journalist, wore no credential around her neck and did not identify herself, her intentions or her affiliation as an unpaid contributor to Off the Bus, a section of The Huffington Post. While her digital audio recorder was visible in her left hand during that encounter last Monday, she says, she did not believe Mr. Clinton saw it. “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday.
The incident, widely mined on the cable news channels as fresh evidence of Mr. Clinton’s volcanic temper in the waning hours of his wife’s presidential campaign, has prompted an entirely different discussion — this one among political reporters, journalism teachers, public relations strategists and bloggers themselves — about the dos and don’ts of ethical reporting in the YouTube age.
Among the questions posed last week was this: in an era when anyone with a cellphone and wi-fi connection can make like Tom Brokaw, do the long-accepted conventions of engagement (like a reporter’s volunteering who she is without being asked) still apply?
“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Jonathan Alter, a columnist and political reporter for Newsweek, said in an interview. “If you don’t have trust, you don’t get good stories. If someone comes along and uses deception to shatter that trust, she has hurt the very cause of a free flow of public information that she claims she wants to assist.”
“You identify yourself when you’re interviewing somebody,” Mr. Alter added. “It’s just a form of cheating not to.”
But to Jane Hamsher, a onetime Hollywood producer who founded Firedoglake, a politics-oriented Web site that tilts left, Mr. Alter’s rules of the road are in need of repaving. For starters, she said, the onus was on Mr. Clinton to establish who Ms. Fowler was before deciding to speak as he did. That he failed to quiz her at all, Ms. Hamsher said, was Mr. Clinton’s problem, not Ms. Fowler’s. As a result, Ms. Hamsher said, the public got to experience the unplugged musings of a former president (and candidate’s spouse) in a way that might never have been captured on tape by an old boy on the bus like Mr. Alter.
“It’s hurting America that journalists consider their first loyalty to be to their subjects, and not to the people they’re reporting for,” she said. Told, for example, that the Times ethics policy states that “staff members should disclose their identity to people they cover (whether face to face or otherwise),” Ms. Hamsher was dismissive. In the context of political reporting, she said, such guidelines are intended to “protect this clubby group of journalists and their high-ranking political subjects, and keep access to themselves.”
“That,” she added, “is not the world we’re living in anymore.”
Ms. Fowler, it turns out, is the same person who used her status as a contributor to the campaign of Senator Barack Obama (something disclosed on the Huffington site) to gain access in April to an Obama fundraiser in San Francisco that the mainstream news media was not invited to. Here again, her digital recorder picked up an incendiary remark — Mr. Obama saying of some economically frustrated Pennsylvanians, “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”
Kelly McBride, leader of the ethics group at the Poynter Institute, a training center for print and television reporters (and more recently those online) said she saw merit in Ms. Fowler’s work, but cause for concern, too.
“On the one hand, when political candidates are so polished and put together, with their images so crafted for the rest of the universe, I think it’s good for democracy that it’s harder for them to maintain that because of citizen journalism,” Ms. McBride said. “But I also worry that as citizens take on the role of journalists, the amount of trickery will escalate — the sort of baiting of people and egging them on.”
Ms. Fowler, who has worked as a teacher and written fiction, had no experience as a professional journalist before joining the campaign trail a year ago. Eventually, she came to the attention of Off the Bus, a joint project of Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen, a media critic and professor of journalism at New York University. The idea is to pair motivated amateurs like Ms. Fowler with professional editors like Marc Cooper. Mr. Cooper, the project’s editorial director, has been a contributing editor for The Nation for more than a decade and an occasional contributor to The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and other publications.
“All the rules of the game that we’ve been teaching in journalism school, it’s not that they’re immoral or bad or wrong, it’s that they just changed, my friend,” said Mr. Cooper, who teaches reporting at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. “We didn’t even do it conspicuously. The rules of the game have been redefined by technology. We’re merely the instrument of that.”
Still, Mr. Rosen said he remained concerned that Ms. Fowler had not tried, in the span of a conversation that lasted several minutes, to alert the former president to who she was. (Speaking Friday, she said she had her Off the Bus business card in hand moments before meeting Mr. Clinton, but somehow lost it before she could give it to him.)
“In the interest of full disclosure, it would have been better if she said, ‘Mr. President, I’m a blogger from Off the Bus and I have a question,’ ” Mr. Rosen said. “I also understand the situation she’s in, he’s on a rope line, and it’s crowded and there are people shouting at him.”
“We didn’t anticipate exact circumstances like this,” Mr. Rosen added. “We didn’t think up guidelines for what to tell her in a situation like this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/weekinreview/08steinberg.html
