Greg Sargent of the Washington Post’s The Plum Line Blog recently posted a piece scolding BigJournalism.com for not properly observing journalistic ethics. Yet in the process Sargent made a number of assumptions based on his own biased beliefs and ultimately ended up not only muddying the waters but seeming to commit the same errors he claimed Big Journalism was perpetrating.
The BigJourno post written by P.J. Salvatore revealed a cell phone message recording left accidentally by a member of the staff of CBS affiliate KTVA TV in Anchorage. The recording was made while an editorial staff meeting was on going and the caller apparently didn’t realize he had not hung up the phone. What resulted was a recording of a few minutes of an editorial meeting the gist of which could easily be interpreted as a planning session on creating and airing attack reports on Alaska’s GOP senatorial candidate Joe Miller.
Sargent thought that Salvatore’s interpretation was absurd and speculated that the BigJourno piece was “about to be unmasked as bogus.” He went on to accuse the BigJourno team of editing the recording, leaving context out, and intimated that Salvatore tried to make a mountain out of a mole’s hill likely for ideological reasons.
Sargent reported that KTVA general manager Jerry Bever denies that the meeting heard on the recording was any sort of planning session on how to attack GOP candidate Miller, but was instead a meeting discussing what would happen IF such stories came out. It was a “what if” bull session, not a serious planning session said Bever.
Station manager Bever says, “While the recording is real, the allegations are untrue.” He went on to give his version of what the meeting was about.
The perception that this garbled, out of context recording may leave is unfortunate, but to allege that our staff was discussing or planning to create or fabricate stories regarding candidate Miller is absurd. The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do.
The TV folks have no recording of the meeting and nothing to counter the recording that Salvatore posted.
For his part, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post disses the original report by Salvatore as if it was some sort of effort at right-wing propaganda. He intimates this even as he says, “But it’s unclear from the recording precisely what, if anything, was being plotted.”
So here is the question. How can Greg Sargent claim that Salvatore’s report is somehow suspect when he admits that the cell recording is “unclear” as to what is transpiring? A truly unbiased reporter could only say that neither side has any direct proof of intent. But Sargent does not go the unbiased route with his scolding. He accepts the TV station’s version of the incident and suggests that Salvatore is wrong. That Sargent says the recording is “unclear” yet then assumes that Salvatore’s report is “about to be proven bogus” is telling.
Finally we get to Sargent’s claim that the Breitbart staff must have edited the recording.
The full audio is only on the cell phone of Miller’s campaign manager. Will the campaign release it? Also: Who edited the audio that Big Journalism posted?
This is an out right calumny. (Though in an update posted hours after the original post, Sargent admits that BigJourno could have posted “all that was recorded on the cell phone.”)
The truth is that there was no editing of the recording. Cell phone answering software does not record indefinitely. Such services only have a limited time for recording after which the cell phone automatically hangs up if the caller does not hang up himself.
We are left with two conclusions based on Sargent’s editing charge. Either he doesn’t know how a cell phone works or he does know but was trying to mislead his readers into thinking that the Breitbart website was acting in an unethical manner. Does anyone believe that a member of the media in this day and age doesn’t know how a cell phone works?
Now, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that there is no conclusive evidence either way. One can accept that the TV folks were merely speaking in what ifs or one can believe that Salvatore is right and the recording “clearly shows” that the meeting was planning attacks on candidate Miller. But since we only have a snippet of the meeting recorded, we can’t say if further context might clarify the situation.
But one thing is sure. That these TV folks were so entertained by the idea of finding child molesters in the audience of a Joe Miller rally certainly proves the ideological leanings of those on the TV station’s editorial meeting. Is it any wonder that Salvatore interpreted the recording to be anti-Republican in intent?
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