Hillarysworld

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News Meeting — January 12, 2010 05:30 PM

“Burned” Book

Did Halperin and Heilemann play fair with Harry Reid?

By The Editors

The controversy surrounding Harry Reid’s remarks has occupied the nation’s political press since they broke late Friday
night.

But a second controversy lurks behind: did John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, the authors of Game Change, the book reporting the comments, “burn” Senator Reid by reporting his analysis of how candidate Obama’s electoral chances might be affected by being “light-skinned” and bereft of “Negro-dialect”?

It’s a complicated argument—made no clearer by missing information from all of the main participants—stemming from confusion about the terms. While the authors have so far declined to state that their source for the quote was Reid himself, the senator’s office has said that’s the case.

Halperin and Heilemann insist they haven’t “burned” anybody. Further more, they outlined a definition of “deep background” in their author’s note, and suggested those were the terms of all the book’s
interviews.

But it seems that Reid has been telling people he feels like he was “burned” by the authors, perhaps because he never had the terms of the interview explained properly to him. While there’s evidence suggesting some of the fault lies with his staff, even at the highest levels of politics, how far should journalists go to make the terms of their conversations clear to their sources? And what would be the consequences if reporters were more explicit in this regard?

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Number one, Harry Reid's comment wasn't even remotely controversial, despite the use of the archaic term "Negro" for African Americans that was in wide and accepted use up until the 1970's. It's not like he used the "n" word.

Secondly, the discussion around the opaque sourcing is just splitting hairs. Ultimately, it matters little whether H/H got the quote from Reid and thus "burned" him outright, or got the quote from one of their malevolent, vicious interlocutors. These scumbags aren't journalists in any sense of the word, and it is futile to argue journalism standards about their work when they have no standards.

Heilemann and particularly Mark Halperin are the bottom-feeders of the beltway, ingesting the detritus of Campaign 2008 and expelling vicious and malevolent offal for the giddy consumption of the beltway gossips. It is telling that these obviously misogynist scumbags reserved their most malicious slander for the women in the campaign. Truly, deeply disgusting.

Posted by James on Thu 14 Jan 2010 at 09:08 AM