The Formerly Gray Lady soul-searches on the topic of quote approval.
It was difficult to find a news outlet that had not agreed to quote approval, albeit reluctantly. Organizations like Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reuters and The New York Times have all consented to interviews under such terms.“We don’t like the practice,” said Dean Baquet, managing editor for news at The New York Times. “We encourage our reporters to push back. Unfortunately this practice is becoming increasingly common, and maybe we have to push back harder.”
I am not trying to be incendiary by the following analogy --I'm not suggesting moral equivalence between Obama and Saddam-- but I'm going to ask a question. How far do we go down the road of quote approval before we are here (remember this 2003 column from the CNN Baghdad bureau chief about how they never reported the actual news in Baghdad so they could keep their Baghdad news bureau open?).
Ah for the days of, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Or Robert Novak's motto that there are only two kinds of people in this world: sources and targets.
Don't we have to say that the 24 news cycle means the news is always on, but devoid of content? And doesn't that lead precisely to the spectacle of this past week, wherein al-Qaeda murders our Ambassador and personnel, but Mitt Romney is the enemy?
Yes, there's liberal bias in the way the story's been handled. But more there has been the mindset that news consists in quotations from politicians about stories, not in stories. Where are the damn reports from Libya and not from the screen shot outside the West Wing?
