Anonymous Tips U.S. Newspapers Wouldn't Print Find Way Into News Cycle-How It Works

[babylonsister]

http://washingtonindependent.com/36224/british-tabloid-rumors-catch-drudges-eye-liberals-ire

British Media Rumors Catch Drudge’s Eye, Liberal Ire
Anonymous Tips U.S. Newspapers Wouldn't Print Find Way Into News Cycle
By David Weigel 3/30/09 12:02 AM



snip//

“All British reporters bring to their reporting an impish desire to entertain as well as inform,” said Shipman, a graduate of Cambridge University who’s leaving Washington to cover Westminster politics for the Daily Mail. “Britain is very intensive newspaper market and you don’t get anywhere unless you tell your readers something extra. We take the view that politics ought to be fun.”

That isn’t the view of Democrats who have been burned by the Telegraph’s stories. “They use anonymous sources to a degree that makes you wonder if they actually have them,” said Bob Shrum, the retired political consultant who managed the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). “I would have murdered someone from the Kerry campaign if they talked to the Daily Telegraph.”

Democrats have a long list of grievances with the Telegraph, the most recent examples all traceable to Shipman. In the past year he reported that close allies of former Vice President Al Gore were pushing him into the Democratic race to end the Clinton-Obama standoff, that former President Bill Clinton warned that Obama would have to “kiss his ass” to get an endorsement and that a source close to the new president worried that the insultingly cheap gift of DVDs he gave to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown meant that Obama was “overwhelmed” by his job. Democrats who worked with those campaigns told TWI that these stories were, respectively, “a total lie,” “just not true,” and “something nobody thinks is true.”

snip//

Phil Singer, a former spokesman for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, watched the pipeline in action. “Drudge would link to one of these articles,” said Singer. “Drudge would put up a fancy splash banner headline. The American media would see it on Drudge and then chase it.” But in 2007 and 2008, Singer and the Clinton campaign succeeded in neutralizing some sensational Telegraph stories by putting out quick responses online. “The Internet allows you to burst the bubble.”

Eric Alterman, a liberal media critic who has written about the way conservative memes move through the news cycle, agrees with Singer. “In the olden days, these papers carried some authority because people had little idea what they were up to. But now that the prestige of the media has fallen so low, their capacity to do damage strikes me as part of another era.”

“They’re cheap dates,” said one former McCain campaign staffer. “If you give something to the British press you know it’ll make it into their story and then whether it gets around is a matter of whether other people want to take it seriously.” The staffer pointed to the example of a Sunday Times (U.K.) story that quoted McCain staffers, accurately, as saying that they’d talked about a pre-election “shotgun wedding” between Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston. The plan was scuttled, but the gossip was real, so it became a story that bounced all over the political media. “That was a lot of fun.”

It’s all part of how the Telegraph’s correspondents work. “British reporters see themselves as tradesmen who work the angles and occasionally hang out in the bars and dig up the facts by a wide variety of means, some of them occasionally unorthodox,” said Harnden. “American journalism has tended to see itself as more academic profession, on par with the law or medicine and as part of the Establishment.”

“We self-censor less than American reporters,” said Shipman. “It puts peoples’ backs up from time to time. People will say we’re putting out Republican talking points, which is complete bollocks. If anything, Republicans are reading what we write and picking up on it.”

[ellenfl]

1. k&r eom