End of Saban/Herald/Radio story

Skolnick is a cool name, but his writing sucks. Not nearly as good as Kevin Van Valkenburg's.

 

So if Joe Schmoe, Politician, is in a press conference in front of 500 people, shouts out, "This is off the record," and then launches into a tirade about niggers, spics, jewboys, you name it, etc etc (or for that matter, makes ANY statement he later decides to disavow), all of those 500 reporters are bound to abide by it?

Nope.

 

Well, then we get into debating over the volume and intensity with which Saban uttered his embarassing comments, whether they would be better described as a "tirade" or an "offhanded remark."

And whether anybody printed it the next day or not -- that's a news-value judgment made by each of those writers individually.

Or maybe, in some cases, because they felt under some kind of peer-pressure "gentleman's agreement", or that Saban's preemptive assertion of "off-the-record" status was binding on all of them.

Bottom line, the source doesn't get to just say "off the record!!" and consider everyone in the room bound by it (unless they specifically contest it).

 

somebody make it stop

 

mizzou, can i get a jemele hill apology? or at least a definition of "one of our own" so i can determine who is and who isn't "one of our own."

 

As always, if you manage to shovel through all the muck on these threads, you find a keeper.

 

technically true but not the real world

covering a beat isn't JO 101

because in most cases, it's going to be more important to you to keep that source and keep that off-the-record info coming than to get one piece of it in the paper and never have that source again

 

My head hurts.

Bottom line in all this controversy to me.

Even if Darlington did think he had the Herald job, I wouldn't tell my bosses unless it were offered to me because you never know what can happen. That's just common sense. Nothing to rip a guy about.

Whether the Saban stuff was strictly off the record or not, you are going to get in trouble if you don't write something but give the goods to someone else who does broadcast it.

If you don't think it's newsworthy and it still makes news, you are still cooked.

 

We can't even get 10 people on my beat to agree on the terms "off the record," "deep background" and more, which tells me our industry is deficient in setting its own parameters about such matters.

I agree with Starman, but in the court of public opinion, consider this: more people watch Hollywood movies than go to journalism school, and if you can't even get people who went to journalism school to agree on what is off the record, then that narrows it even further. So, if a public figure says something is off the record and it's printed, the majority of folks out there will assume the media was wrong for reporting it.

At a time when the media's approval rating is pretty bad, I'd say the court of public opinion would mostly weigh in as follows:

1) Public figure is a prick for saying that.
2) Media was ethically wrong for reporting it, but it's kinda good to know.
3) Just proves you can't trust those bastards, though.

 

I wonder if I'm a venerable enough poster to get this thread, and others I don't like, locked up.

I like the Bears, and people were saying mean things about Rex Grossman last night. Should have told Moddy to lock that one up, I guess.