Reporters and Their Sources: Mutual Assured Seduction
Greider, William
REPORTERS AND THEIR SOURCES Mutual Assured Seduction by William Greider As the author of that notorious article on David Stockman,* I confess that I was educated, too, by the experience. I...
...Second, the skillful reporter will negotiate with his or her “off the record” source...
...At several points, when he was making sensitive remarks, he reminded me that his comments were for use later, not now...
...Under the informal rules the Washington press obeys, “off the record” means, first, that the public official cannot be quoted either directly or indirectly on what he has said...
...Stockman began telling us when he was part of the group, back in 1979, that he was establishing a connection with Greider...
...And I think this is one of them...
...Sometimes an especially sensitive source will haggle over the precise anonymous attribution to be given to his remarks, worried that discerning readers will be able to puzzle out his true identity...
...So 1 don’t think that there is anything in the article that somehow varies with where my position has been...
...As a newspaper editor, thinking my submerged conversations were helping to inform general readers, I was most troubled by my belated recognition that the messages were not getting through...
...Neither of us ever discussed this aspect of our communication directly...
...Our mutual motivation, despite our different interests, was crassly self-serving...
...It was two naughty little boys breaking the rules to see if they could get away with it...
...he suggested I turn off the “damned machine...
...We did not socialize together or play tennis on Saturday mornings, but we had known each other for several years...
...I had been attracted by his brilliant critiques of modern liberalism, published in Public Interest and elsewhere...
...The boldness of his candor was transformed by the news into something neither of us had anticipated, a bizarre news event like “Man Bites Dog...
...Some of them asked: Why did you do it...
...STOCKMAN COMES CLEAN In early August, after the president’s tax and budget legislation was enacted, I concluded that the political drama had reached its natural climax and it was now time to write the full account of what Stockman had told me...
...Thus, an aide to the president may insist that he be labeled “an administration official” but not “a senior White House aide...
...By now, it should be clear why Stockman and I both offended the “rules...
...Thus are born the “senior White House official,” the “State Department adviser,” and the “key congressional aide...
...The business of news ought to take responsibility for what the consumers of news understand...
...After a time one develops an insider’s skill at reading these veiled messages...
...I am at least certain that other ambitious reporters will seek similar opportunities, soliciting new kinds of arrangements that will allow more of the private reality to reach the larger audience unmuffled...
...How could you save all those sensational nuggets for so many months and not print them in the daily newspaper...
...And the tone of private dialogue, presented without modification, overwhelmed the daily impact of the same messages delivered in code...
...From time to time he would complain about some aspects of the Post’s coverage, particularly the stories that detailed who was going to suffer from the Reagan budget cuts, but he also praised some stories and individual reporters, particularly the ones whose analysis cut through the public rhetoric to the true core of the policy debates...
...It has to do with the operating conventions that press and public officials have accepted among themselves, each for his own ends, and how those conventions serve only a very limited market-the elite audience of government insiders-while obscuring things for the larger audience of ordinary citizens...
...I assume that David Stockman said much the same thing to other journalists, reporters, and columnists that he said to me...
...I knew that many of his offhand remarks would sound sensational, but I wanted to be fair to the context of the material (as well as to Stockman...
...what has occurred here is simply an honest but rather large misunderstanding as to the terms of the relationship we had...
...Presiding over the United States government is not like starring in a television series...
...The conservative columnist George Will, who also breakfasted with the budget director, described the, feeling: “When I said something dumb about the decline of productivity, he rolled his eyes heavenward and indicated that productivity is a complex subject that I should leave to the adults...
...me best new journalism will take risks, sharing more fully with the reader or TV viewer what the reporters themselves understand to be R ppening.’ ABSENCE OF INSIGHT After the controversy subsided, I was left to ponder a different and larger question about the press...
...They see themselves as neutral conveyors, responsible only for delivering the startling facts as they occur...
...My obligation would be to produce a full and serious account of Stockman’s narrative, an honest piece that would respect the complexity of the subject (an obligation I believe I kept...
...My own visit to the “woodshed” was less dramatic...
...government officials who genuinely wish to keep a secret will begin by not discussing it with any reporter, regardless of the ground rules...
...There are self-imposed barriers built into the daily news that diminish the quality of reality that is conveyed...
...The president was chosen for four years, not one season, and his promises, as well as his performance, should be judged on that basis...
...Kraft observed the same gloomy predicament confronting the Reagan administration: “A loss of intellectual bearings describes most clearly what has happened...
...It would force the reporter to question the implicit limitations he has accepted in his transactions with public officials...
...Like the political community it covers, the press is a prisoner of its own conventions, trapped by rules and reflexes that seem useful and necessary to the practitioners but ultimately limit their effectiveness...
...Many of the inquiring reporters were in too much of a hurry to read the article and wanted me to summarize it for them over the telephone (I winced at the memory of having done the same on occasion...
...Is it too romantic to believe that other government officials will take similar risks in the future and let their honest thoughts serve as their defense...
...Outsiders will ask: If these talks were truly “off the record,” how could the contents be useful to n e Washington Post...
...The “off the record” interview is still valuable to a reporter, however, partly because it usually provides an unvarnished and relaxed glimpse of what a public official really thinks...
...I asked questions and he answered them, a reporter interviewing a government official...
...It would challenge the comfortable arrangements of symbiosis and depreciate the closed system that exists between press and politicians...
...In official utterances, the White House spokesman may deny a problem the ubiquitous “senior officials” are privately acknowledging...
...he also knew well enough, from my own articles and questions, that I was skeptical of the laissez-faire conservatism that he espoused...
...This arrangement, of course, gave me several critical advantages that are not usually available to working reporters in search of daily news...
...I did not have to rush into print with what Stockman told me...
...I would try to explain the “ground rules” under which the interviews had taken place and the context of Stockman’s agreement...
...I emphasize the homely point: At the outset, Stockman and I were participating in a fairly routine transaction of Washington, a form of submerged communication which takes place regularly between selected members of the press and the highest officials of government...
...1 invoked our mutual interest in the larger questions of the modern welfare state and the conservative reform movement of which he was a leading voice...
...In most respects, events did confirm his judgments...
...And: “Events have now buried the theory of expectations in the same grave as the view that wishing will make it so...
...A skillful reporter can actually get much of this information into the newspaper or broadcast...
...They will denounce the reporting as “slanted” and admonish the newspaper to simply report the facts without embellishment...
...People seem to “know” everything now-hearing the same news bulletins repeated around the clock-but they seem to understand precious little of what’s really going on...
...Stockman, it was suggested in an article by one curbstone analyst, was perhaps enthralled by the relationship, using the sympathetic presence of an older journalist as a confessional, a place to speak forbidden truths and seek personal expiation for the sins of Reaganomics...
...In time, when the waiters saw me enter with my tape recorder, they would turn down the Muzak so the background music would not intrude on my recordings of our conversations...
...Often the reporters will be wrong...
...One morning, for instance, I had to wait my turn because Stockman was finishing breakfast with Robert Novak, who writes the Evans and Novak syndicated political column...
...often it is a closed conversation only the sophisticated few can follow...
...If people were so stunned by the narrative reality in “The Education of David Stockman,” then what did that tell us about the reality of the “news” conveyed to them each day throughout the year...
...But symbiosis is an elementary mode of operation in the ecology of Washington affairs...
...I understood it to be off the record...
...He says such things agreeably, like a Gatling gun that has studied with Dale Carnegie...
...The press, including myself, of course, was usefully serving its smaller audience of the governing elite but not communicating very clearly with the larger public...
...The Stockman narrative leaped over those fences and inadvertently revealed the inadequacies of what gets told on a daily basis...
...Even more painful were the accounts in the press and on television describing the article’s contents...
...The historic legacy of modern media tells the practitioners that this is what the audience craves...
...The content would cause him considerable political pain, he told me, but the account was “not unfair to me...
...Sometimes large misunderstandings occur in life with very unfortunate and tragic effects...
...I watched-with what can only be called wry innocence-as the daily news reports gave brutal summaries of what I had written...
...These stories of doubt and misgivings and policy battles had, in fact, been printed in the newspapers, but clearly they were not told in a way that made much impression outside the inner circle...
...Beyond the inner circle, the public was truly shocked by the news bulletins of Stockman’s “confessions...
...We wanted journalists who were opposed to us to sit down and listen to us, because the whole thing that keeps us moving is our ability to communicate ideas...
...It’s a misunderstanding, but it is not an act of bad faith on his side nor on mine...
...He would tell me something newsworthy and 1 would ask if I could put that in the newspaper...
...Reporters who complain privately about political demagoguery and distortion usually lack the freedom to call it that in print...
...What happened last week...
...Newspapers and TV will discover that the past can be as startling as the present and the future...
...He was using me and I was using him...
...Stockman accepted and we began our periodic nine months...
...Stockman and I were “old friends” only in the limited social usage of Washington, where anyone who has met someone twice at dinner parties is apt to call him an “old friend...
...Sources understand this as well as reporters do...
...It was well known I have strongly felt that if we’re going to keep the budget on track, we would have to deal with the matter of entitlement and social security...
...In his appearance before the White House press, Stockman provided a mild and generous account of what had happened in our arrangement...
...By talking honestly, Stockman contradicted the rhetorical claims and slogans his own colleagues were offering for their program...
...We have...
...Nor is this remarkable...
...The sum of the parts was more powerful because it was a comprehensive narrative, not splintered into daily stories...
...In this case, it was “Public Official Says What He Really Thinks...
...That is what they crave-understanding...
...The governing impulse is to simplify and startle...
...Until Americans get those questions straight in their own heads, they will continue to be deluded by TV performers of one variety or another...
...Evans and Novak began the year describing Stockman in the most admiring terms...
...She was right, of course, about the psychology...
...He cited only one example: David Stockman...
...The information may not be used...
...The political calculations made in the spring were not past, splintered events that occurred and disappeared...
...Both Stockman and I, operating from different roles, had done the unexpected and effectively ignored the prevailing, unwritten conventions that govern the behavior of both press and politicians in Washington...
...Half seriously...
...Almost from the start, Stockman and 1 bargained like this over the content of our interviews...
...Together, we violated the standard operating context in which public officials communicate through the press...
...As an editor, 1 was acutely aware of the criticism aroused when newspapers strayed beyond those limits...
...The more that question is asked, the more public officials will be compelled to provide honest answers...
...It also refutes the images of order and progress conveyed by the daily news...
...By recounting Stockman’s genuine thoughts in a comprehensive manner, I was effectively refuting the simple and shallow version of reality that the news created in its daily slices...
...As a participant, I was right in the middle of that contradiction (or on both sides of it), and perhaps this allows me to see and describe the weakness more clearly...
...Come on,” she says...
...I had expected, after the original flurry of reaction and controversy, that some attention might be given to the deeper questions raised by Stockman’s account of governing...
...They will see events through distorted lenses...
...It was well known, for instance, that I felt some adjustment needed to be made in the defense program and it was...
...It was an education...
...Why did Stockman do it...
...After many years as a reporter, asking and demanding that other people explain themselves, I also found myself suddenly on the receiving end and I felt a bit queasy (public officials might say this would be good medicine for every reporter to take...
...If the interviewer hears something compelling and newsworthy, he may ask the source if that particular information can be put “on background...
...I suggested to Stockman that we begin meeting regularly to discuss “off the record” the flow of events in which he would be a leading participant...
...Or the Pentagon might easily discern in a critical “news analysis” piece in The New York Times that the secretary of state or his assistants had provided the ammunition...
...Readers who long for comprehension will nevertheless complain about analytical stories that offend their version of the truth...
...I promised that he would not be quoted in the daily newspaper...
...I assumed that Stockman’s candor would provoke political controversy, enraging his political opponents and embarrassing the Reagan administration, but I was not prepared for the full tempest that followed...
...First, the reporter can seek out the same information elsewhere...
...By going public, Stockman violated the privacy and prerogatives of that network, and so did I . Publishing the raw version of reality automatically depreciates the value of every insider’s knowledge...
...I rather liked that last explanation...
...Notwithstanding Wanniski’s melodramatic description, others in the press make similar transactions in which information is shared for self-interested purposes...
...Americans consume more information about public affairs now than at any previous point in history, yet they do not seem to have gained a deeper understanding of events, much less control over them, from this deluge...
...Yet the press was as shocked as the partisan politicians...
...BREAKFAST WITH CAPTAIN NUMBER CRUNCH In the fall of 1980, after Ronald Reagan’s dramatic election victory, it became clear to me that Reagan would launch a powerful offensive against the status quo, and that Stockman was his likely choice for the pivotal role of budget director...
...Still, I think the audience will understand if reporters try to explain more and startle less...
...Only in Washington, after all, is it considered bizarre when someone important comes forward and tells the truth...
...In short, I question the narrow rules of objectivity that govern news judgments and inhibit the news media from truly describing the reality before them...
...is a daunting experience...
...The appearance in print of the budget director’s candid commentaries shocked sophisticated readers, who nevertheless were not surprised by the substance of what he was saying...
...Later, as an editor, I commissioned several provocative articles by him for The Washington Post’s Sunday edition...
...There was no discussion of our “ground rules,” but throughout our conversations there were many instances that made it clear to me that Stockman fully expected he would be quoted directly in the full account...
...George Will, we already know, was Stockman’s friend and confidante...
...Actually, neither of us was really thinking about the form the writing would take...
...And the young budget director had established a valuable connection with an important newspaper...
...Sometimes I would direct a reporter to go in the front door and ask Stockman or other officials questions he had already answered through the back door...
...I think there’s been some misunderstanding...
...I could hardly quarrel with the accuracy of the technique (having practiced it myself for many years), but it disappointed me...
...On another occasion, my appointment was preceded by one with Joseph Kraft...
...As a reporter, anxious to tell this enormous story, I did not press for reasons...
...At his White House press conference, Stockman expressed his own puzzlement: “. . . Almost anything other than maybe an indiscreet quotation or expression or metaphor that was contained in that article basically reflects things that I had been saying in our private deliberations as well as in public comments over the last nine months...
...As voters become wiser, however, they are still dependent on the images and information the news media provide them...
...Now, as a writer, I had an opportunity to tell the whole story...
...I do not expect news organizations to abandon those values entirely, but it ought to be obvious that the emphasis on them leaves readers and viewers with a rather incoherent sense of time and continuity...
...We had an early breakfast at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House...
...the material would be saved for comprehensive treatment at a later time when we both agreed it was appropriate...
...the mistakes made in April flowed naturally into the gloom felt in September...
...The unvarnished private dialogue of government is supposed to remain private-and separate from the bland, reassuring rhetoric of the public discourse...
...Sometimes he would bring up matters on his own, items he wanted to see in print...
...Instead of endlessly asking what’s going to happen next, the news media ought to devote more energy to a different question: What really happened...
...I will not attempt to read his mind...
...by late summer, when it was clear that Stockman wanted to cut the Pentagon budget, Evans and Novak portrayed him as an enemy...
...The president kept him on as budget director, and, despite many predictions to the contrary, Stockman continued to be effective in the job, though dramatically less visible...
...Under the Washington rules, “on background” means that the information can be used if attributed to an unnamed source vaguely identified as authoritative...
...A practicing politician would say that I was remarkably naive...
...But the modern deluge of information has changed the audience, I believe, in ways that the conventional news organizations simply do not recognize...
...After the storm broke, he changed his estimate somewhat...
...Following the news carefully every day, reading the code with an insider’s eye, 1 too thought the substantive “news” of the article had already largely been reported...
...This was substantially what he had said to me in private a few weeks earlier, when 1 was arranging for photographs and reminding him that his published remarks were going to stir up a political tempest...
...After the public controversy, Jude Wanniski, a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and an original apostle of supply-side economics, complained bitterly about the relationship in an interview with the Village Voice: “What has depressed me personally most over the year is the relationship Stockman developed with The Washington Post...
...I’ve been saying those things all over town for months,” he said...
...Those who had followed the coded dialogue, who had translated the news stories about “senior budget officials,” or perhaps heard Stockman say the same things in private meetings, knew well enough where he stood...
...On other occasions, a source will reflect on what he has said “off the record” and agree that his remarks can be reclassified as “on the record,” directly attributed by name...
...A viewer cannot switch channels if his hero begins to falter...
...On many days, these two elements will be merged and the dominant “news” will consist almost entirely of predictions made yesterday about what might happen in the future...
...The press must reinvent its definition of news...
...Far from creating confidence and smashing inflation, passage of the president’s program fortified the conviction that government deficits will rise...
...I learned, first of all, what every experienced politician already knows: the whirling eye of the news media is an uncontrollable organism that creates its own eccentric versions of what happens...
...At the outset, naturally, neither of us could have predicted the paradox the finished writing would describe: a season of stunning legislative victories by the president that trapped him in an awesome fiscal crisis...
...To understand this, however, one has to appreciate that neither of us entered into our unique arrangement with the expressed intention of changing the “rules” or even offending them...
...In one instance, when he was commenting critically on a Republican congressional leader, he pointedly advised me that this material would be permanently “off the record,” never to be used...
...The “off the record” conversations provide guidance, context, and, sometimes, the truth about matters...
...This coded dialogue may or may not contribute anything of value to the governance of the republic...
...It’s become the standard practice at the Post, to have their Deep Throat and get a Pulitzer Prize...
...A long and complex narrative, constructed to preserve subtlety and ambiguity, was swiftly rendered into tart little capsules, the choicest nuggets of “news” that might provoke and embarrass...
...The secretary of state may be optimistic in his public declarations, but privately heis gloomy...
...He announced this to us as a coup...
...more likely they are bored because it is so opaque...
...If that sounds obvious, it is really a radical proposition for news organizations...
...The daily newspapers or the evening TV news broadcasts are not likely to conclude that “today” or “yesterday” is less compelling than “last month” or “last year...
...But, after the first few sessions, it was established as the implicit, sometimes even dominant, business at the breakfast table...
...How, after all, can an ordinary citizen with only a limited interest in public affairs really know what’s happening...
...Oh, yes...
...Why had this been kept secret...
...Icould examine the continuity of his narrative at leisure, reminding him in July of what he had predicted in February...
...I had established a valuable peephole on the inner policy debates of the new administration...
...He would ponder the potential effects and, more often than not, consent...
...He applies his own common sense to all propositions, particularly ones that suggest magical solutions to enduring problems...
...it cannot even be attributed anonymously to an unnamed “administration official...
...While the best reporters and editors do care about them, the reigning conventions of the news business do not...
...Other citizens may be baffled by it...
...Despite the shock of truth telling, Stockman did survive in his job...
...The values slighted are the ones probably most valuable to the consumer: context and comprehension...
...They will not always be able to dig to the deeper level of reality...
...What was the final lesson for government officials and the press...
...He examines his own impulses: Am I voting for an empty sentiment from the past or for a plausible vision of the future...
...After all, they are in the business of daily news...
...Why did he tell you all those things...
...I would call his office on Friday afternoon and ask if 1 was on the schedule...
...Stockman understood that I agreed with some essential elements of his political analysis, particularly the incoherence and corrupting reflexes of interest-group liberalism...
...Over the months, this obviously was a useful arrangement for me as an editor at the Post...
...In time, as I pondered the reactions, I came to realize that perhaps this episode revealed something deeper about the press, a contradiction in its own reflexes and behavior that helps explain why the news from Washington seems so confusing and, indeed, uncommunicative-to many Americans...
...I would use him and he would use me...
...It was well known, during the deliberations of the tax bill, that 1 felt we should stick to our policy-based rate cuts and depreciation reforms and we should do everything possiblegiven the legislative circumstances and the realities of the moment-to minimize any excess costs of the bill due to ornaments and secondary matters that would not have an economic effect in the sense of promoting the recovery...
...Still, they found it shocking...
...In sum, the press communicates much less coherently than it thinks it does...
...I would then share the nuggets at the office...
...This was offensive, in different ways, to both fraternities, though Stockman endured considerably more criticism than I did...
...Why did Stockman do it...
...I was struck, in particular, by a Kraft column in early September, two months before the publication of my Atlantic piece, that was an uncannily concise outline of the story I was telling...
...After many years in the news business, I came to the conclusion, independently of the Stockman episode, that the reason for this is that there are fundamental flaws in the way the news media package reality and convey it to the general population...
...The networks cannot cancel a president when his ratings decline...
...Perhaps he assumed that his provocative statements were already known to the central players of the Reagan administration and that few would be shocked (we both misjudged this, I think, and reasonable critics might conclude that we were both lost in the warp of inside knowledge...
...The best new journalism will take the risks and try to go deeper-not self-indulgently or for partisan advantage but to share more fully with the reader or TV viewer what the reporters themselves understand to be happening...
...In the daily news, there is no “past,” only today and the far-off tomorrow...
...Publishing the raw version of reality automatically depreciates the value of every insider's knowledge...
...I wanted to retell Stockman’s singular story in a way that would allow the broadest understanding of what had occurred...
...That was the intellectual content of it...
...We said that’s great...
...He asks himself: Does this make sense...
...Interviewing Bvid Stockman on fiscal policy at 7:30 in the mom in is a daunt in experience George Will has likened it to talking to a “Gatling Gun who has studied with Dale cizmegie...
...it made us sound so noble...
...To go further would require the objective journalist to tread beyond the safe limits of what is knowable from daily reporting into the analytical realm where the reporter is obligated to try to make sense of things for the reader...
...It now places an extraordinary premium on essentially contradictory elements: the immediacy of what happened yesterday and the prophesy of what will happen in the distant future.’ As a reporter, collecting a rare account of the chaotic realities of government, I felt a different obligation...
...He would supply them with all the secrets, inner thoughts of the administration, meet with them over and over and over again...
...As the political events of 1981 grew more complicated and diffuse, we had less and less time for philosophical asides...
...An extraordinary premium is now placed on essentially contradictory elements: the immediacy of what happened yesterday and the prophecy of what will happen in the distant future...
...Partly, I suppose, it is required as self-protection...
...My wife, who has never met David Stockman but understands me well enough, brought me back to earth...
...By going public, Stockman violated the privacy and prerogatives of the network between reporters and public officials...
...The whole Washington Post was wired into David Stockman...
...he apologized for his indiscretions and offered his resignation...
...Experienced politicians and reporters found it implausible that a ranking public official would participate in so many lengthy tape-recorded interviews (1 8 in all) and afterward pose for photographs, and yet continue to believe that he would not be quoted by name, In any case, Stockman’s flattering references to mean “old friend” and “long-time intellectual adversary”stimulated some exotic theorizing about his psychological motivations...
...It did not need to be spelled out between us...
...But it soon became clear to me, as every politician must already understand, that complicated explanations do not hold up well if the inquiring reporter is seeking something brief and pithy...
...it took the form of a general chorus from the news media that I had betrayed the sacred principles of news-“Editor Scoops Own Paper,” as one headline put it...
...As an insider who can read the code, I could study the coverage of 7he New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and the columnists and see muffled reflections of the same reality that Stockman was describing so vividly in our conversations...
...All asked the same questions, not about the content, but about the personalities involved...
...As long as the comments were ‘kubstantive” as opposed to “ad hominem” personal attacks, Stockman said he was not concerned about the potential impact...
...I appreciated his generosity, but I did not think there was a misunderstanding...
...I would get ajump on the unfolding strategies and decisions...
...He does not rely on experts...
...Or was he trying to rewrite history in advance...
...The congressional budget process is a fiendishly difficult story in any season, and interviewing David Stockman on fiscal policy at 7:30 a.m...
...Or a White House official might read an Evans and Novak column and form a reasonable hunch about which anonymous senator was attacking the president...
...Neither, it seems fair to note, did many of those familiar with the ways of Washington...
...Whether it exists between politicians and reporters, lobbyists and congressmen, bureaucrats and private interest groups, the functional politics of the city involves complicated webs of such informal relationships, transactions for sharing access and information which go largely unobserved...
...The major turning points, from altering the economic assumptions for the original budget forecasts to the climactic battle over defense spending, all were described in advance in newspaper stories, albeit usually attributed to a “senior budget official” or some other suitable cover...
...Knowledge of the arrangement and its fruits were discreetly shared among the appropriate editors and reporters at the Post...
...if the substance is confirmed independently from other sources, the reporter is free to write it, without violating the ethical strictures of “off the record...
...The system sustains itself on mutual needs: a politician who learns that the press will treat simplistic rhetoric only as news will learn how to fill that need-or else find himself shut out of the news columns...
...As a reporter, 1 first sought him out when he was a bright young congressman from Michigan...
...Largely, I think, it is a discreet form of veiled communication that press and policy-makers find useful...
...Others saw it in slightly more lofty terms: here were two serious students of government, drawn together by mutual respect and a zest for intellectual combat, holding their own private series of earnest seminars on the fate of the federal government...
...In that netherworld of continuous private conversations, reporters and columnists are informed how government officials really feel, but the press is obliged to muffle or moderate the messages, to cloak the hard edges of doubt and disagreement with the opaque mantle of anonymity...
...Kraft noted that “some in the administration recognize what is happening...
...In early September, at our last meeting, I again reminded him that I was preparing to publish the full account of our conversations, and again he assented...
...He would be able to prod and influence the focus of our coverage, to communicate his views and positions under the cover of our “off the record” arrangement, to make known harsh assessments that a public official would not dare to voice in the more formal setting of a press conference, speech, or “on the record” interview...
...The fancy name for this is symbiosis, which perhaps gives it more dignity than it deserves...
...Joseph Kraft, while never citing Stockman as a source, described with remarkable consistency t he same story that 1 eventually told in full...
...Stockman may have been more systematic and bold in his pursuit of linkages with the press, but he was doing what virtually every “senior official” of government does routinely...
...Obviously, I was wrong...
...I could wait to see whether events confirmed or refuted his opinions...
...The press, I think, has to reinvent its definitions of news...
...As Wanniski suggested, he could study the news columns of the Post and conclude that Stockman was the unnamed source...
...I proposed this to him and he agreed...
...What is going to happen next week...
...Mostly, this is what newspapers do, with unsatisfactory results...
...I appealed to his sense of history...
...It might also help if the press acts less horrified the next time it happens...
...So this arrangement was all in place back in January, February...
...In the original storm of controversy over the article, David Stockman had lunch with the president...
...Why had no one told them any of these things...
...Still, I was surprised to learn afterwards that Stockman himself had apparently boasted to his colleagues about the arrangement...
...It has developed and flourished over many years, a way in which participants in the political debates canargue with each other in semi-public disguises, sending critical messages to colleagues, attacking adversaries, influencing the flow of public dialogue and the content of elite opinion without having to answer directly for their utterances...
...It was as though editors and reporters had no memory of what they’themselves had been reporting for months, albeit in the coded dialogue of insiders’ stories...
...His trip to the Oval Office, Stockman said, was “more in the nature of a visit to the woodshed after supper...
...I wanted intelligent readers to grasp that the famous and powerful people who make government policy live in the same bewildering context of change and uncertainty that confronts all human endeavor...
...He understood it to be off the record for uses in the newspaper over the period in which our conversations occurred...
...How does the outsider get beyond the politician’s rhetoric and see the deeper reality of ongoing events...
...So did I.' This spirit of amiable disagreement informed our conversations, but the talk was hardly like an academic seminar...
...He begins, I hope, with healthy skepticism toward all grand claims made in the political arena...
...Bill Greider is an old friend of mine and has been a long-time intellectual adversary...
...But it is surely possible to reimagine how stories are to be told and what is to be the most important content...
...His position as the Deep Throat . . . with Greider, Bob Kaiser, Caroline Atkinson...
...On a few occasions he absolutely refused to answer my questions because he regarded the information as too sensitive -and too tempting-for me to be trusted with it...
...As a newspaper editor, 1 worked according to the realm of news, its rules and daily limitations...
Vol. 14 • October 1982 • No. 8
