To her credit, Harvard professor and Pulitzer-winning author Samantha Power doesn’t deny calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” during an interview with journalist Gerri Peev from The Scotsman.
Unlike lesser beings, Power didn’t take the traditional Beltway Escape Route and apologize for upsetting people. Instead, she apologized for what she said and resigned as an unpaid Obama foreign affairs adviser.
A long, thoughtful BBC World Service interview recorded the day before this storm erupted suggests how much Obama loses if Power truly absents herself from his counselors.
She might have said the “monster” quote was fabricated, misunderstood or taken out of context. She could have accused Peev of violating an “off the record” understanding, but there was none.
Here’s what she said:
“We fucked up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win. She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything. You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh.’
But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.”
Generally, journalists agree that nothing is off the record unless the reporter agrees beforehand. Saying “off the record” later does not make it so.
I know of no reporter who would have put “monster” off the record after it was uttered. It’s candor that reporters, editors and headline writers rarely hear.
Beyond ethics, agreements to go off the record can be enforceable oral contracts. If journalists break their promises, they can be sued and lose. The First Amendment may be no defense, and judges are increasingly deaf to reporters’ assertions of confidentiality.
It’s best to avoid off the record. Think about negotiating with these questions in mind:
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2008.