{"id":4294,"date":"2010-06-26T12:39:51","date_gmt":"2010-06-26T16:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4294"},"modified":"2010-06-26T12:39:51","modified_gmt":"2010-06-26T16:39:51","slug":"the-ungentlemanly-art-of-reporting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/06\/26\/the-ungentlemanly-art-of-reporting\/","title":{"rendered":"The ungentlemanly art of reporting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Wells<\/a> looks at the methods employed by now-famous reporter-to-the-generals Michael Hastings:<\/p>\n

\n

Hastings is blunt about the fun a reporter on short-term assignment can have when he doesn\u2019t have to worry about the repercussions of what he writes. \u201cMy job was basically: Ride the buses and planes with the candidates, have big lunches and dinners on the expense account, get sources drunk and singing, then report back the behind-the-scenes story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there is this paragraph. The sentence with the bad word is the most interesting to me as it will be to you, but the whole paragraph, with its tensions and contradictions, is worth considering:<\/p>\n

   The dance with staffers is a perilous one. You\u2019re probably not going to get much, if any, one-on-one time with the candidate, which means your sources of information are the people who work for him. So you pretend to be friendly and nonthreatening, and over time you \u201cbuild trust,\u201d which everybody involved knows is an illusion. If the time comes, if your editor calls for it, you\u2019re supposed to fuck them over; and they\u2019ll throw you under a bus without much thought, too. (I should say that personal friendships can actually develop, despite the odds.) For the top campaign officials and operatives, seduction and punishment of reporters is an art. Write this \ufb02uff piece now; we\u2019ll give you something good later. No, don\u2019t write it this way, write it that way. We\u2019ll give you something good later.<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n

This deserves to stand as one of the great bits of journalistic self-flagellation and revelation, only a notch below Janet Malcolm\u2019s famous confession that \u201cEvery journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Taylor Empire Airways<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Wells looks at the methods employed by now-famous reporter-to-the-generals Michael Hastings: Hastings is blunt about the fun a reporter on short-term assignment can have when he doesn\u2019t have to worry about the repercussions of what he writes. \u201cMy job was basically: Ride the buses and planes with the candidates, have big lunches and dinners […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,5],"tags":[218,31,86,477],"class_list":["post-4294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-military","tag-afghanistan","tag-army","tag-criticism","tag-magazines"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-17g","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4294"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4296,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4294\/revisions\/4296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}