Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Inside Baseball

Rich Galen

Friday January 28, 2011

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In the news business, media outlets will expend enormous amounts of energy trying to be the first to publish any nugget of information.

Everyone of any stature in any office has been pressured by reporters to divulge something about which he or she has been sworn to secrecy, threatened with immediate termination if leaked, or both.

Reporters spend lots of time and their employers' money cultivating "sources." That is so successful, that it is understood that everyone in Washington has at least one major reporter's cell phone number on their speed dial.

In order to try and control this BP Oil-level of leakage, many documents are distributed in advance with an "embargo" - that is a tacit agreement that a reporter or news organization is being given this material so they can look at it and analyze it, but they cannot release it prior to the time and date on the embargo.

Important documents, like the President's State of the Union address may be "Embargoed for Delivery" that is, as soon as the President said, "Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President �" everyone who got an advance copy is free to post the speech and their analysis of it.

That's why you hear talking heads on the cable news channels saying things like: "We expect the President to talk about �" They know what the President is going to talk about because they've read the text.

Documents like an SOTU are also tagged: "As Prepared for Delivery" so that if the President has edited the speech in the limo between the White House and the Capitol, reporters are not supposed to refer to any last-minute adds or, more newsworthy, any last-minute deletes.

All that is the unwritten agreement between newsmakers and the media.

It is an agreement which, in the age of Matt Drudge, is being ignored more and more often.

On Tuesday, after the SOTU, I wrote this:

The embargo for releasing the speech was busted by the National Journal which posted it on its website at 7:14. NJ apparently got it from a White House insider and promptly posted it.

That generated a Cranky-Gram from the National Journal's Editor-in-Chief, Ron Fournier in which he refuted the fact that the NJ had not busted the embargo on the grounds that when they had gotten the speech from a Democrat insider, the speech hadn't yet been distributed by the White House so there was no embargo to bust.

Ron Fournier used to be the chief political reporter at the Associated Press (as well as its former Washington Bureau Chief).

He redefined the beat. When a President-elect was putting his Administration, it was a pretty safe bet that Fournier would be the first to find out and publish who the Secretary of Defense was going to be; as well as who was likely to be Deputy Secretary of Interior or some other secondary or tertiary post. He was that good.

So, going back to the business of how to characterize National Journal's publishing the advance text of the SOTU. I guess the appropriate way to have written that bullet point would have been:

The National Journal apparently got a stolen copy from a Democrat insider and posted it at 7:14.

Or,

Ron Fournier beat Julian Assange to the punch and posted the text of the SOTU at 7:14.

Ok. Mildly amusing, but not fair.

An interesting discussion will be over exit polls on election night. During the primary season starting in early January 2012, news organizations will be allowed to subscribe to the service which conducts those polls. Results are typically released at mid-day and then again in the early evening.

The deal is: The receiving organizations may not declare winners and losers until the polls have closed in any given state.

That's why you see CNN, MSNBC, or Fox "call" a number of races at the top of each hour. They've known for some time who was going to win, but they had to withhold that information from you so as not to influence those voters who might not show up if they didn't think their vote was going to matter.

Exit polls are the worst-kept secret in Washington. Everyone - EVERYONE - has access to someone who has access to them and for many reporters that's the payback. Reporters send the top-line results around to sources who then forward them to their friends, colleagues, and clients to prove they are the most inside of all the insiders.

That being the case, it will be interesting to see how Politico, National Journal, Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and all the rest of the new media sites treat the embargo on releasing exit polls.

Ron?

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: A link to the New York Times article on the National Journal's early release of the SOTU - which I had first. Also a Mullfoto from my Africa trip and a Superbowl-based Catchy Caption of the Day.

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