As a Roll Call subscriber, I saw this story yesterday, but didn’t think much of it at the time.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee is set to launch its first television ads of the cycle, targeting Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.) and charging that the longest-serving Senate Democrat has grown out of touch with voters back home.
Republican strategists would not reveal the total cost and scope of the ads, but said that the NRSC is spending in the range of tens of thousands of dollars on its first television buy of the cycle. The initial buy, which will be concentrated in the large media markets in the state, may be expanded later.
NRSC spokesman Brian Nick described the spot as “a bio ad” that highlights what they consider to be Byrd’s political evolution over the course of his Senate tenure. The ad has already been cut and it is expected to begin running at the end of this week.
No huge surprise. The NRSC thinks Byrd is vulnerable, it’s trying to soften him up for Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), so the ad buy makes some sense.
The problem here, however, is with the story itself. The Roll Call piece didn’t include a word from any Dem at any level. No response or reaction from Byrd’s Senate office, his campaign, the DSCC, the state party, etc. Usually a reporter would bother to get a comment from someone on the other side, for at least the semblance of balance. But in this article, nada.
It turns out that there’s a very good reason for this. Roll Call got the information about the ad buy with a very big condition — as Kos explained, “Roll Call writer Lauren Whittington got the story from the GOP with the ground rule that she not call anyone else for the story.”
Karl Rove perfected this trick during the 2000 campaign. With beat reporters looking for any little morsel that their rival colleagues don’t have, Rove would routinely offer journalists something juicy, so long as he or she would run a one-sided piece and not even call the other side for a reaction. Reporters played along.
Because Rove knows to go with what works, the practice continues.
Complying with “ground rules” set by Bush administration officials, The Washington Post published a July 26 article that presented the White House’s arguments for withholding documents written by Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. during his tenure as the Justice Department’s deputy solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush — without any Democratic rebuttal.
Under a purported embargo, which the Post said prevented reporters from revealing the administration’s decision until midnight — “too late” to contact Democrats for a response — staff writers Peter Baker and Charles Babington quoted anonymous White House officials spinning the decision regarding the documents. But while other contemporaneous print media reports noted Democrats’ previously stated arguments for full disclosure of the documents, the Post omitted them for the second day in a row.
I understand the Rove machine’s efforts at manipulation, but I can’t comprehend reporters’ willingness to be exploited this way. Roll Call’s reporters don’t work for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The Washington Post’s staff does not get paid by Karl Rove. Independent journalists, who presumably work under some sense of professional ethics, should never allow their sources to dictate how their stories are written.
As Atrios explained:
It looks like Republicans have learned a new trick in the media. If you give exclusive stories to journalists with the condition that no Democrats are to be allowed to comment on the story, journalists think that’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Not only that, but they won’t even bother to do any additional research for the story.
At this point, the reporter is effectively putting his or her byline on a press release. Also at this point, it stops being journalism and starts becoming hackery.