Joe Klein

[davemarc]

At 08:53 AM 7/27/96 -0400, Paul Mackin wrote:
>
>This is disputed I know but IMHO reporters have neither more nor less 
>obligation to say THE TRUTH than anyone else. There is nothing so
>terribly special about the media. It's no more sitting in a public trust 
>or complicit in the System and Theydom (however you want to put it) than 
>a fairly big percentage of the rest of us. 
>
Reporters are not obligated to say the truth when they are approached as
*sources*.  But in the United States and elsewhere, ethical journalists (I
realize that in these post-1984 days that sounds like an oxymoron) are very
much in the business of ferreting out facts and sharing them with the
public.  They should be expected to do so, and their performance should be
evaluated in terms of their success in doing so.

On the subject of Joe Klein, I don't think that he's terribly culpable in
this particular case.  He published a book "anonymously" and decided to
mislead reporters seeking to discover the identity of the book's author.
Many journalists did not take his remarks at face value and continued to
consider him a likely novelist, eventually compelling him to fess up.

Looks to me like the really compromised person was editor Maynard Parker,
who knew that Klein was Anonymous, deliberately misled his columnist
Jonathan Alter, and then accused him of sloppy journalism at a supposedly
reconciliatory staff meeting before finally apologizing to him in a more
private context.  Parker seems to have botched a conflict-of-interest
situation pretty badly.  Good thing the whole brouhaha was merely about
Primary Colors.

davemarc