Michael Kruse on Maggie Haberman

[BYH 2: Electric Boogaloo]

I ran a check thru the J and S&N boards and didn't see this and I try to stay off the politics board for my sanity and b/c high blood pressure runs in my family...so if this was posted there, my apologies to the Mods and feel free to merge/delete. But I wondered what everyone thought of this from Friday's Politico.

'It's My Curse and My Salvation': Trump's Most Famous Chronicler Opens Up

I really like Kruse, whose pieces are always well-written and exhaustively researched. And this piece met his usual standards in those regards. But I thought he was a little too quick to credit Maggie's output at the Times as a way to excuse her, you know, saving her stories on the scandal that could have (and still might and probably will!) end American democracy for her book.

I also thought it was interesting that she's basically the template for almost every big-time writer now: Comes from good stock and/or big money and thus can afford to spend two years as a newsroom clerk making $40 a day before getting his/her big break. In her case, she was literally placed on to the lap of power (quite the visual for what's going on now) at the age of six.

Like most of us here, I remember when there was a path in this Godforsaken business for those not born on third base. It now seems to be the only path to the big-time for most types of journalism, which all but eliminates the hungriest and grittiest...and those most eager to hold the powerful accountable. Doesn't strike me as a very good thing. Anyway, curious for everyone's thoughts.

 

[Regan MacNeil]

The number of political journalists who stan Maggie makes me weep for the forking profession.

She withheld vital information of heavy public interest from her employers in order to make money on a forking book. THAT'S NOT OK! I don't care what her employers say. Have some forking integrity.

 

[SoloFlyer]

As much as a I despise the fact that she withheld stories for the book, she's not the first reporter to do that.

I'm curious when that trend began. If I remember right, Woodward/Bernstein's Watergate reporting was simply repackaged in All The President's Men to go along with the behind the scenes details of how the two did their reporting.

I'd also be curious to hear from executives as to why they're OK with reporters like Haberman doing this. Do they think it's going to somehow sell more newspaper subscriptions if snippets of the book appear in Politico, Vanity Fair, GQ and other outlets? What's the rationale to permitting this?

 

[Vombatus]

It's another sign of how the storytellers promote themselves these days.

 

[The Big Ragu]

According to the NYT, she took a leave of absence to write the book. They seem OK with it.

If she did that reporting in the course of writing the book, I don't see it as her having withheld anything. The NYT doesn't own her -- depending on the terms of her employment contract, at least. She also likely would have never been doing the reporting that got her the stuff in the excerpt if she hadn't been writing the book. The people who agreed to do off-the-record interviews well after the fact, knew it was going to be for the specific book she told them she wanted to interview them for.

In terms of the vital public interest of the stuff that is in the book, that is a pretty big judgment call. I'd be more sympathetic to people saying that if she knew that Trump was saying "I ain't leaving!" while he was still in the White House and she sat on it. But Joe Biden was already president when she was doing that reporting. It was history then, it's still history now. We all already know that Trump had been plotting, bullhsitting and being Trump, and we all saw January 6. It's not like her rushing that to print in a newspaper in 2022 would have changed anything about how things went down. So public interest, maybe (almost anything related to the actions of someone while they were POTUS is in the public interest), but I don't know how vital it was to anything that she scoop her own book.

 

[Octave]

The dirty little secret in newsrooms used to be that some of the writers can't write. That applies to Haberman.

 

[Regan MacNeil]

She gathered the info for the entire book while on that leave? Allow me to quote Lee Elia, "My forking ass."

 

[BurnsWhenIPee]

This reminds me back in the early 1990s, after Sam Smith's book The Jordan Rules came out.

A couple of years later, he went on WSCR to talk about the Bulls and NBA, and one of the hosts (Terry Boers, maybe?), led off the segment by saying something to the effect of, "So Sam, is there any big news coming out of the Berto Center that for some reason hasn't made it into the pages of the newspaper that I pay for?"

 

[MisterCreosote]

The dirty little secret in newsrooms used to be that some of the writers can't write. That applies to Haberman.

I used to specifically tell my people they were reporters, not writers. Because trying to write almost always led to trouble.

Keep it simple. Tell people important things in a way they're most likely to understand. It ain't rocket science.

 

[SixToe]

I know the NYT has some protocols and policies for their staffers about writing books, and probably the WaPo and other outlets. I guess it would be similar to a columnist in Lexington or Baton Rouge or some other mid-smaller town wanting to compile columns or features in a "Best of" publication.

But I agree that it's weird that stories, facts and info learned in the course of working for the NYT don't make it into the NYT yet appear in a book promoted by other outlets. And the NYT is OK with that. That's crazy to think about. I don't understand how that could work in the office, or be ethical to your employer. Maybe they allow that as a tradeoff for the rigors of the beat. Still weird.

She found out information during the course of her work that she, I would guess, expanded upon during her leave of absence to write the book. If so, why was that not expanded upon during her time reporting on DT? That's what I would have issue with if I was the NYT executive, similar to the Jordan Rules stuff. If Smith knew when he was covering the Bulls, why not write about it then?

I've never written a book or covered high-profile celebs-politicos so I guess things are different at that level. Still strange, though.

 

[Azrael]

eh

 

[MeanGreenATO]

I've never understood the Haberman hate. People think she wasn't slanted against Trump enough but her work always ends up painting him in a poor light.