Reporting Through the Wrong End of the Telescope

Over at Politico, co-founder John F. Harris is admitting that, gasp, news organizations may tend to blow up small-ish stories in order to generate traffic.

As leaders of a new publication, Politico’s senior editors and I are relentlessly focused on audience traffic…In this focus on links and traffic we are not different from nearly all news sites these days, not just new publications but established ones like The New York Times.

(The NYTs you say? Not the same Times that is merely interested in showing us how we live?) In this case what Harris is specifically referring to is this week-end’s “uproar” over Hillary Clinton’s Robert F. Kennedy gaffe. Politico was quick to post the story, with Harris’s encouragement, under the headline “Hillary cites RFK assassination in explaining why she’s still in race.” Ah, but as it turned out, once Harris watched the actual tape of Hillary’s SD interview the quote, in context, wasn’t quite so shocking, after all (though, clearly a blunder).

It was a deflating experience…The RFK remarks were deep in a 20-minute clip of an otherwise routine conversation. Then, once we actually got to the relevant portion of the video, it was hardly an electric moment.

Harris isn’t making too many apologies, however, and unlike some other news organizations, cops to some pleasure at having other Politico news “nuggets” gain traction in the mainstream. Plus, in the end, we shouldn’t worry too much, says Harris, “the distinguishing feature of most political hype storms is that they pass quickly. Who the hell can remember what we were up in arms about last month? Wasn’t it something about Sinbad and a telecom lobbyist who was bitter about being a Muslim?”
As we recall it, there was also something about a flag pin, cleavage, and if you stretch really far back, a little nugget about a swift-boat. But yeah, not to worry, we still have a few more weeks till this election year starts for real.

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