A Place to Stand

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "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," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

"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."

This is the Scotsman interview - full article here

The Scotsman have got some stick, mainly from US bloggers, for publishing this when Ms Power said, retroactively, "that's off the record. The Scotsman defended themselves:

Before the interview began in London, Ms Power was asked whether it could be taped. She agreed.

However, she tried to withdraw the comment on Hillary Clinton after she said it, claiming it was "off the record".

Mike Gilson, The Scotsman's editor, said: "We have no opinion on whether Ms Power was right to quit and perhaps politics should be able to retain people with talent who are prepared to learn by their mistakes, but we are certain it was right to publish.

"I do not know of a case when anyone has been able to withdraw on-the-record quotes after they have been made. The interview our political correspondent Gerri Peev conducted with Ms Power was clearly on an on-the-record basis

Seems to me, if this how it happened & if the Scotsman have a tape it seems clear, then the Scotsman are quite right. The nature of contracts is that they are not alterable retroactively at the behest of 1 party. If off the record is always a somewhat dodgy "get out of jail free" card the person using should make sure they have it in advance. They were quite right to publish.

An instance where "off the record" was used pretty successfully & very morally dubiously was when Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, in an off the record talk to the western media said that the US official briefings about the Rambouillet talks preceding the Yugoslav war were not being conducted to achieve agreement but to bring about war because "the Serbs need a little bombing"

Now, in the June 14 issue of the Nation, George Kenney, a former State Department Yugoslavia desk officer, reports:

An unimpeachable press source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this [writer] that, swearing reporters to deep-background confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department official had bragged that the United States "deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept." The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason.

The only breach came from the unimpeachable source, presumably some journalist in his cups so Mr Kenny, who was not a journalist & had definitely not accepted this off the recordness had not breached the rules.

However there is a much wider question of journalistic ethics. The western media may have felt they couldn't break Albright's confidence but by keeping to her instructions to pretend that the "negotiations" were something more than shadowplay they lied to their readers. If journalistic ethics are supposed to include reporting "all the news thats fit to print" then they had an obligation not to accept Albright's instructions to lie & at the very least, allowed the suggestion that the aggressor was the US & other NATO powers & the Yugoslavs & Milosevic at least more innocent, to be reported.

For example - The headline over a New York Times dispatch from Belgrade on March 24--the first day of the bombing--read "U.S. Negotiators Depart, Frustrated By Milosevic's Hard Line." - the paper certainly knew this was a deliberate lie. The NYT was deliberately lying to their readersto get their readers to support a genocidal war purely because their masters wanted it. If this is journalistic ethics the the term is an oxymoron.

Equally in the present instance, US reporting of a unique instance of a top member of an electoral team calling a candidate a monster has gone very lightly reported.

If it wasn't legitimately off the record then it was on it & there should be no pussyfooting as there clearly has been.. I don't know if this interview was only offered to the Scotsman but since it is not the newspaper of choice for reporting on the US election, not even the newspaper of choice, it seems quite possible that others rejected it. If so they have show the US media to be even more subservient than our own.