Off the Record? Yeah, Right
Journalists get annoyed at sources who won’t go on the record, and the ones I talk to like to stay on the record themselves. When they go off–usually because they want to keep their jobs–they often apologize.
Who should come? “Reporters… editors…lawyers…students…citizens concerned about the First Amendment.” In other words, anyone who wanted to. Yet the discussion would be off the record. The flyer made this clear over and over. “Those willing to report on the subject may contact the panelists independently but may not quote or refer to their comments during the program.” Posner must be one scary guy.
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The ground rules might have added a note of drama to the marketing, but otherwise they were pointless. The reporter’s privilege case before Posner was already history–the other judges on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals had rejected a petition to review Posner’s opinion, and the reporters’ lawyers had decided not to appeal it to the Supreme Court. And no one could expect an audience of some 60 people to leave with lips sealed. The most tangible effect of the edict was that a group of students studying media ethics and law at Columbia College who would have written papers based on what they heard at the meeting instead held a class discussion based on what they heard and then wrote papers about that discussion. Their teacher, Meg Tebo, told me that an off-the-record meeting of journalists struck her as “a little oxymoronic.”
Kathleen Roach, who’s been Pallasch’s lawyer in the reporter’s privilege case, also sat on the panel. Like her client, she tells me, she said nothing she wouldn’t have said regardless. “I tend to sort of assume everything I say is potentially for attribution,” she says. “If I’m going to talk to a group of 60 people, including journalists and lawyers, I’m going to think about what I say before it comes out of my mouth anyway.”
Frustrated by these compromises, Rhodes proposed various strategies to Babcock–they could turn Press Box into a blog or Rhodes could leave Chicago and continue the column as a contributing editor. At lunch a few weeks ago Babcock told Rhodes he wanted him to stick to writing articles. “He’s a terrific writer,” says Babcock. “Unfortunately, our stories are extraordinarily labor-intensive. He can’t produce them and still turn out a labor-intensive weekly media column.”
