Deep Throat … How Necessary an Evil?

GUEST: Harry M. Rosenfeld
VTR: 12-17-1989

HEFFNER: I’m Richard Heffner, your hose on The Open Mind. And my guest today is a distinguished journalist with whom I share a great many things. Our generation, for instance. Though he’s a blessed half-decade younger than I am, we’ve both gotten a bit long in the tooth. We went to rival New York City High Schools that traditionally battled each other at football each Thanksgiving Day. And, a few days before this past Thanksgiving – on November 18, 1989 to be precise – we both celebrated the birth of a grandchild (rivals always: his a girl, mind a boy). And we like and respect each other.

But the parallels may stop there for I’m a theorist, a teacher at heart and in fat, despite excursions into media. While my guest, Harry Rosenfeld, the tough-minded Editor of the Albany, New York Times Union, is an accomplished, hands-on practitioner of the most powerful enterprise in our times: Journalism. Formerly Foreign Editor of the old New York Herald Tribune, Mr. Rosenfeld is probably best known for his years as the Assistant Managing Editor of the Washington Post, where he was in charge of the Post’s extraordinary Watergate expose, which effectively knocked Richard Nixon out of the White House, won a Pulitzer Gold Medal for public service and perhaps changed the fact no only of the American press but perhaps of Americans’ sins of themselves as well.

Nowadays Harry and I most frequently meet on the field of battle concerning cameras in the courts. But unless one or the other or both of us prove to be totally irascible that’s not our topic today. What is the American Journalist’s penchant these days for using confidential sources, which my guest has described as “a necessary evil. Without them, much of the very best in journalism would not be possible. At the same time, nothing so much brings our blood to boil. We decry their use and we despair of their ubiquity.” Without confidential sources – and you know the euphemism so often used by journalists and their unindicted co-conspirators “off the record”; “background”; “deep background” and so help me, “deep, deep background”; “not for attribution”; “for guidance only.” – without them, says my friend Harry, “much of the very best in journalism would not be possible.” But I want to ask him today whether with them much of the very worst in journalism has also occurred. Never mind what makes his and other truly good journalists’ blood boil. That doesn’t concern us. What does concern everyone is just how bad a journalistic situation this supposedly “necessary evil” has created? Harry, what’s the answer?

ROSENFELD: I don’t know that there’s an answer, but I share your concern. I think it’s worth talking and thinking about. It’s worth discussing, precisely because it’s happening in journalism where we cannot make the rules. We cannot say you may be a journalist and you may not be a journalist, and this practice is prescribed by professional standard. We don’t have, if you will, both the penalties and the advantages of being a profession, strictly speaking.

HEFFNER: Why not, why not? Why do you say we can’t make the rules? Doctors do, lawyers do, others involved very much in public interest oriented professions do.

ROSENFELD: Because our strength, the strength of the press – and when I say press I want to include all the other aspects of the radio, and television, and magazines, and book publishing – is served best when it is really open to everyone, and that is really the founding principle underlying the First Amendment. We’re not going to set a bunch of rules that says that you may publish every newspaper that is acceptable to a certain level of taste, and certain respectability. I think that would be disastrous in practice, and our strength is that we don’t say these things about ourselves, that we are open to everybody. But the very fact that this strength exists, it is also a difficulty for us, for that exact same reason, because any body can come and play.

HEFFNER: But I…honest to gosh I’m puzzled by that. I’ve heard many of your colleagues; your journalistic colleagues say that in many important forums, and at this table. It’s almost as if even the profession or the field, call it what you will, is too important or it’s not important enough, but someway, somehow you can’t be subject to the same self-discipline that others are, why not?

ROSENFELD: Well, we can subject ourselves to self-discipline, and that is what I’m about and many others in out craft, as I like to call it, are doing, and we’re becoming much more self-conscious. And I invite you to attend any one of our meetings – editorial, and national editors meetings – and my God, the gloom and doom about ourselves that pervades the atmosphere as we examine ourselves and cross-examine ourselves, its’ getting to be positively depressing, but it does show an industry, if you will a draft, that is concerned about the questions, does not take them lightly, and that is striving within the parameters of our history, or tradition to deal with these issues. We are not going to deal with them alike, nor is it necessary to deal with them in a categorical way. I think it is important that we do.

HEFFNER: You say “doom and gloom”, why the pervasive doom and gloom, when you and your colleagues in what you choose to call a craft (and perhaps we should go into why you choose to all it a craft) why the doom and gloom?

ROSENFELD: Because, it is a period of self-examination and when you’re doing that if you’d be, to some substantial degree, honest with yourself, you’d begin to identify the shortcomings. And you speak about them, and you survey them, and you critique them, and you write about them, and you lecture about them, and pretty soon your day is filled with contemplation of these things.

HEFFNER: But not permit someone else to say the same things, or permit someone to say, “You fellas, now, get together and do something about this besides talk.”

ROSENFELD: We have never, I don’t believe, I can’t recall, said to anyone, “you can’t say these nasty things about us.

HEFFNER: No, I don’t mean that. I’m…and I shouldn’t have put it the way I did. Let’s think about the National News Council. Were you, by the way, in favor of the National News Council?

ROSENFELD: No, I wouldn’t’ be in favor of it, not because I m in favor of irresponsible journalism, but because I think you cannot tamper with these really fundamental Constitutional provisions. When you start playing with this thing you can’t be a little bit pregnant. You can’t start accounting for yourself with anybody else. The genius of the American system continues to e what we are so diverse and, if you wish, anarchic. It’s our strength, there’s a great deal of strength in that, and I don’t think we should…AI know we shouldn’t tamper with it. I don’t think we should lay down any precedence that will circumscribe us for the future. It is very easy, very easy for the press to become totally establishmentarian, totally serving the powers that be, and you must commit every avenue remaining open to the dissenting voices, even if they’re not the respectable – in your terms, or my terms – especially if they’re not respectable in our terms as a matter of fat. We’re old foggies as you said.

HEFFNER: Don’t you think the doctors could say the same thing, the lawyers could say the same things about, “we’ll discuss what’s going on in here”?

ROSENFELD: Well as a matter of fact they do say the same things, as a matter of practical fact. But don’t ruin me with comparisons and analogies, we’re not talking about doctors and we’re not talking about lawyers. We’re talking about the press.

HEFFNER: Fair enough, let’s talk about confidentiality then. Let’ talk about the question you’ve written so tellingly on, and AI know you’ve expressed your own concern s about this penchant for confidential sources. What’s the next step? You’ve written about it, you’ve referred to a survey. It’s so interesting, you wrote in the ASNE Bulletin, you wrote about the survey that had been made, a study undertaken on behalf of the Ethics Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors…

ROSENFELD: Example of what I was saying earlier. That came out of the newspaper business itself that came out of the Ethics Committee, if you would.

HEFFNER: Then what came out of it, the study?

ROSENFELD: Well, the publication of the study in the Bulletin which goes to every senior, every chief editor who is a member of the organization, and I assume that much, by far most of them are. That’s the way, it’s the communication of it, it’s the self-consciousness of it.

HEFFNER: And what would you expect would come out of this self-consciousness? You say there was virtual unanimity among the 44 journalists who responded to the survey, that confidential sources risk a newspapers credibility with it’s readers. Now you wrote this in what, a year and a half ago?

ROSENFELD: A little longer than that.

HEFFNER: September/October 1988, let’s say a year and a half. What’s happened since then to mitigate these circumstances?

ROSENFELD: I can’t tell you specifically. What I do know is that at my paper, and at other papers, thee is a great deal more discussion that there used to be. There may even be more written guidelines than there used to be. I’m not particularly enchanted with written guidelines for practical reasons, but there is no wondrous solution, or some magic bullet there. What is necessary is for a continuing dialogue to take place within the newsrooms of this country, not only about the issue of confidentiality, but about many other issues, many other situations, many other confrontations in journalism. It’s got to be lively news. There’s got to be an alertness, an awareness that these are matters worth talking about, ad even if there are not final, or formulistic answers, nevertheless they’re worth discussing, they’re worth dealing with.

HEFFNER: Harry when I read ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, I remember it very well that you stand out in the authors’ minds, seemingly, again and again there are references to your questions, your uneasiness about Deep Throat, about the whole business of not being able to attribute statements to individuals…

ROSENFELD: Well, if anything, that happened a long time ago, but if anything my feelings are more intense now than they were then. And I know a great deal or more about the whole question than I knew then. And I think that is also an example, and I would venture that most of my colleagues are much more… you know journalism is on the job training, you don’t qualify, you don’t have an internship, you don’t take a bar association exam, but it’s these gray hairs that tend to qualify us, to some degree.

HEFFNER: Now wait a minute, while you’ve gotten more gray hair, and I’ve gotten more gray hair, the fact of the matter is, if I understand correctly of what you’ve written, that all the others who have gotten grayer in the service of journalism have not let to a diminished use of these deep, deep backgrounds…

ROSENFELD: Well, I think they’re…what our survey accomplished, I hope, was to at least bring down the numbers of terms of art that we’ve enmeshed ourselves in over the years, as only we can do. I mean we can develop our jargon so beautifully. We hold…we’re not trailing any other profession, if you will, in that regard.

HEFFNER: Well you’re wordsmiths.

ROSENFELD: (Laughter) But we can twist ourselves into knots and I think, and what the study recommended very keenly, “look, reduce these things to the number of terms that are really functional, use them sparingly and use them thoughtfully and make sure; one, that your staff understand what theses words mean”… and it is my great fear, never mind the misunderstandings as among newspapers, there’s also my great fear of misunderstandings within newspapers on what these terms mean, and under what circumstances they should be applied, and what rules should prevail.

HEFFNER: Do those who report to you as Editor of your paper know perfectly well do you believe?

ROSENFELD: No, I wouldn’t be so rash, I wouldn’t be so arrogant to say they know perfectly well. What I know is we have periodic, and what I mean by that is twice a year discussions of issues of this kind. And we have this in a setting in our newspaper around a conference table where we share a lunch together and we bat these things out, and we talk about different aspects of these things. But “perfectly well”, heavens no. You go away from these sessions, and I’m sure everyone takes away their own impressions of what they heard and implements them, and …no there is no such surety that everybody will understand it. What you can do is you can improve it, and you make people self-conscious about it. And even then, when you’ve done all of that, you will still run across examples of failure of that system when some reporter – it happened at my own paper only last week – talks to an Editor into something that the Editor shouldn’t have been talked into.

HEFFNER: Harry, I have to ask a very fundamental question: I want to change hats, I could never wear the journalist’s hat, you’d be the first one to tell me that…

ROSENFELD: Why should I ever do something like that?

HEFFNER: To tell me it, or to think it?

ROSENFELD: To think it, or to say it.

HEFFNER: But seriously, your concern is about the abuse, the over use, and the abuse, of the use of confidential sources. And I gather you believe that the most important thing is that the abuse of this leads to a diminished reader sense of faith and trust in the paper he reads, is that true?

ROSENFELD: That is our belief. Yes, I believe that and I think…it’s my experience…it’s a logical consequence, yes.

HEFFNER: You mean when the paper keeps saying, “an unidentified source said, “or something like that?

ROSENFELD: It’s been my experience over 40 years that that’s so, yes, that the readers then say after a while, “why are they not identified? Why don’t I know who these people are?” Even during Watergate where we turned out to be as accurate as I ever remember a newspaper story being. Remember Newspapers can only print what they know. They can’t print what they don’t know.

HEFFNER: By the way, who was Deep Throat?

ROSENFELD: I don’t know who Deep Throat was, and if I knew I wouldn’t tell you.

HEFFNER: Why?

ROSENFELD: Because I think a confidential source has to remain confidential forever. There are very few circumstances that I can contemplate in which I would reveal a confidential source.

HEFFNER: But there are some circumstances?

ROSENFELD: Well I deal with some in the study. I think if a life is at stake, if it’s a matter of national security, but don’t tell me that it’s going to be the government that decides it’s a matter of national security because they decide that about the most ordinary kinds of things. You know I think…I don’t want to rule it out. I think you have to be alive to the possibility that you might have to, but it shouldn’t be something you tell over a cocktail, or you amuse somebody with on a television interview program.

HEFFNER: O.K., I wasn’t looking for amusement, I was looking for clarification.

ROSENFELD: I heard that Bob Woodward…I read that he might reveal it in a book someday after Deep Throat passes away, and I would not want him to do that.

HEFFNER: Even then?

ROSENFELD: Even then.

HEFFNER: What would the statute of limitations be for you?

ROSENFELD: There would be none. I think you have to preserve the principle. But I would like to say is that the more I think about it, the abuse of unnamed sources is even greater in those that are not confidential than are merely anonymous because there are…unnamed sources fall into two categories: those that are confidential, and under no circumstances should you accept – the rarest ones, as I said, I some life is at stake, a national security matter, issues of that kind –you always hold that pledge, that contract of confidentiality. And then there are named sources, anonymous sources, where you don’t use the names in a newspaper article but if you get into, if you are challenged in a legal sense you may produce them and they have agreed to that. And both sources are necessary, and both are very useful. But I think the greatest number of abuses, and I have no…it’s just my impression of that, comes in not in the confidential area, but in the anonymous area, and with the easy way American society has slipped into not standing by the words they speak, so that even people who are paid, paid spokesman, spokeswoman for organizations or for government agencies refuse to have their names use. And because why? Because they see some risk, some hazard to them in having the most innocuous sort of statement attributed to them by name.

HEFFNER: Do you think there really is anything such as “off the record”? I mean when you get down to it, sure, there have to be some examples of, but do you think it’s really possible, by and large, to keep something off the record?

ROSENFELD: Well, it depends on what you mean by off the record, and again, you need to define it. What I mean by off the record is the information spoken to you by that source can never be use on the basis of that source alone.

HEFFNER: If…let me ask you this question: If I knew that the well being of my family depended upon, that grandchild that I referred to before, depended upon there never being a worked breathed about something that I knew about, do you think that I could wisely, freely say that I’m going off the record, “you won’t publish this will you?” and trust that a reporter won’t?

ROSENFELD: Do you wish it not to be published, or do you wish it not to be connected to you by name?

HEFFNER: Wish it not to be connected to me, I’ll make it easier?

ROSENFELD: O.K., so then we’re not really talking off the record, we’re talking not for attribution, or background or something like that…

HEFFNER: One or the other.

ROSENFELD: I think you have to know your reporter. “Freely?” No, I would never do anything like that freely, but you would have to have a relationship of respect and trust with the reporter. And some are, and some aren’t, and you’d have to make that judgment yourself. Just as the reporter has to make a reciprocal judgment about your integrity and what you’re saying. But I would not respect that reporter, if that reporter simply ran off with what tidbit he garnered from you in this way and rushed it into print. There are many other steps that now takes place after one gets this bit of stimulating information which are perfectly…usually, almost always there are people who can elucidate, who can elaborate, there is often documentation that can be consulted. There’s time and other people may know the same subject. There are many ways to do this. What I object to, and what I think is the greatest abuse, is the trivialization of all this technique, and the commonplaceness of it, and it crops up in so many different stories, especially governmental stories, and especially out of state capitals where I presently reside, and in Washington where AI worked for so many years, where it’s become the habit, and even the panache to do it that way. And the journalist gets co-opted, sort of, into a great sort of secret society and the lines are not kept nearly distinct enough between whose on the stage and who’s sitting in the audience off the stage.

HEFFNER: you know there are so many fascinating things about this. I was going to ask you about Janet Malcolm’s thesis about the press…

ROSENFELD: Yes, Yes.

HEFFNER: But I want to put on that other hat that I referred to a moment…suddenly I am a stockholder in a company that owns a newspaper, and I have read my friend Harry’s piece here, and I see the word…let’s see if I can find it…yes, it has to do with competitiveness, it has to do with your feeling that there is obviously a competitive advantage. And I’m a stockholder, I’m a shareholder and I don’t care what you think if, in terms of your craft’s ethics. I’m concerned with my dollars, and you seem to want to follow a path that reduces my dividends by being so high and mighty about this business of not abusing confidentiality. What’s your response?

ROSENFELD: Well, my response is to do it the way I see it. What’s your response?

HEFFNER: My response is to say if you’re going to talk about competitiveness, as long as it’s a competitive craft, as long as the bottom line is the bottom line, then I’m going to say you maximize that line Mr. Editor.

ROSENFELD: One of us has to make a decision, doesn’t one.

HEFFNER: And which way to you think it’s going these days?

ROSENFELD: I think it goes both ways. I think editors are like other people, they will live with intolerable situations until they become really intolerable, and they will move out. Russ Wiggins who was an old boss of mine, and whose to say, “an editor should edit with his hat on,” and i think every editor should keep that in mind.

HEFFNER: Harry…

ROSENFELD: But I must say I’ve worked for three different business owners in my years in news papering and I’ve never had any one of them pressure me in any way along the lines that you indicate. I think you’re making that yup. I think that’s part of the fantasy of…yes there is competition but it doesn’t…well it does manifest itself in other places.

HEFFNER: But Harry to say, “I don’t work in those places.” Is to make no comment whatsoever about the winds of change, is to make no comment whatsoever about your craft. And you seem to me, in what you wrote, to be saying “I Dei me” for your craft. Yeah, no one would pick you to be Editor knowing the stands that you take and then try to put the screws on you. No one would be that dumb. We’re talking about you, and we’re talking about others, of course, but I’m asking you which way we’re gong?

ROSENFELD: But you wish us to tell that editor who would be comfortable with doing it a different way that, “you’re wrong, and not only are you wrong (because I think we would tell that editor that right today) but that you may not practice our craft. You may not be one of the guys. You can’t be part of the bunch here.” And I will not, I won’t cross that line. That’s too high a price to pay.

HEFFNER: Yeah, but let’s, in the one minute we have remaining…

ROSENFELD: Is that all?

HEFFNER: That’s all.

ROSENFELD: It’s gone so fast.

HEFFNER: It goes that way so you have to come back. Let me focus just for the 45 seconds left, on this question of where it’s going. If you’re really, truly, journalistically optimistic, fine. If you’re not, I want you to let us know.

ROSENFELD: I’m as optimistic now as I’ve every been.

HEFFNER: (Laughter) now tell me what that means.

ROSENFELD: Well that means that it isn’t a perfect world out there, and that this is a fight that you fight continually, and you never win it, and you never (hopefully) los it, but you keep up, and you roll the stone up a little bit, and the stone rolls down a little bit. And it isn’t a perfect world out there, and not everybody is just a bundle of superior ethics, and superior talents, and meshing the two together.

HEFFNER: Harry, one work, is it a better world?

ROSENFELD: It’s the same old world yet.

HEFFNER: O.K. Harry, Thank you so much for joining me today.

ROSENFELD: My great pleasure

HEFFNER: Harry Rosenfeld you’ve really got to come back…

ROSENFELD: I really would like to.

HEFFNER: So we can continue this. Thank you.

ROSENFELD: Thank you.

HEFFNER: And thanks, too, to you in the audience. I hope you’ll join us again next time. And if you care to share your thoughts about today’s program, today’s provocative questions, please write THE OPEN MIND, P.O. Box 7977, FDR Station, New York, NY 10150. For transcripts send $2.00 in check or money order. Meanwhile, as an old friend used to say, “Good night, and good luck.”

Continuing production of this series has generously been made possible by grants from: the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation; the M. Weiner Foundation of New Jersey; The Mediators and Richard and Gloria Manney; The Edythe and Dean Dowling foundation; the New York Times Company Foundation; and, from the corporate community, Mutual of America.