{"id":914,"date":"2005-11-19T04:27:17","date_gmt":"2005-11-19T04:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:27","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:27","slug":"professional_co","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=914","title":{"rendered":"Professional Courtesy And The Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

This internal Washington Post chat transcript<\/a> raised a few eyebrows last week, but one thing struck me and didn’t seem to get brought forward, so I thought I would point it out…<\/p>\n

Jonathan Yardley: The comment of mine two paragraphs above has been leaked, presumably by someone in the newsroom, to the New York Times. Katharine Seelye called me an hour ago pressing for further comment. I declined, stressing that this is a confidential internal critique written solely for the news staff of TWP and refusing to authorize her to quote from it. She called back half an hour later to say that her editor had told her to go ahead and quote from the comment anyway. I told her I expected her to make plain that this is a confidential internal document and that she is quoting from it over the objections of the person who wrote it. She said she would. We’ll see.<\/p>\n

\nI hardly see any point in having critiques and comments if they are to be publicized outside the paper. How can we write candidly when candor merely invites violations of confidentiality? Many readers say they distrust us. Well, now I find myself wondering if we can trust each other. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is just so amusing I almost don’t know what to say.I guess he expected professional courtesy<\/a>…can you imagine what the press would be saying if someone in the White House or Congress were to make the same claim?<\/p>\n

Oh, wait – they have, in this interview<\/a> with Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post:<\/p>\n

Some have charged that the press has gone too far in ferreting out information, but Downie comments: “If you take careful surveys of this sentiment, you find that people are upset for one of two reasons: it [the press] has held up in a bad light someone or something they care about, or the investigative stories get too far into ordinary people’s privacy, and readers feel personally invaded. But if you ask the same people who are offended by these stories if they want more investigative reporting, they always say they do.”<\/p>\n

\nDownie is aware of the responsibilities that go along with investigative reporting. “You’re always balancing the public’s right to know with the right of privacy,” he says. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t think that he’s talking about “critiques and comments.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When their secrets are exposed, the press asks for discretion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}