Letters to the Editor
-
The psychology of "off the record"
I haven't had a chance to read all comments yet, but I think this off-the-record phenomenon has an additional (though related) explanation beyond that they feel personally gratified and validated by close contact with powerful people.
To the "typical" big-name American political reporter, the public interest has long faded as a central priority in their professional lives. The perpetual acculturation of belonging to a wealthy elite of high-profile reporters and commentators has drastically, if subconsciously, shifted their professional philosophy away from seeking truthful information that has public importance, toward seeking further aggrandizement of their reputations among one another as creators of flashy narratives and stimulants for higher readership or viewership.
The entire reason we have an entire media culture that seems to care little about illegal wiretapping, telecom amnesty, and unconstitutional expansions of executive power is because these things have almost purely to do with the public interest vis-a-vis the Constitution, and little to do with dramatic narratives that they can ride to further fame and fortune. Instead, all of the coverage and conversation centers on petty, personality-based squabbles and trite shorthand.
This all ties into the media psychology of off-the-record in the following way. To the reporter, merely hearing something off-the-record and being able to share it (also off-the-record) with their similarly privileged colleagues is sufficient disclosure in lieu of actual public disclosure. As long as these elites know this off-the-record piece of highly important information, they feel satisfied, trading these stories like baseball cards amongst themselves, in widely accepted and presumed secrecy more becoming of a club than a profession given constitutional primacy for the good of the country.
The result is a two-tiered system of information: the first is information that is both sufficiently off-the-record and sensational, which may be released to the public for its attention-grabbing effect. The second is information that is off-the-record and potentially highly important to the country, which journalists not only feel satisfied sharing strictly amongst one another, but feel especially satisfied that they belong to the exclusive elite that is privileged to know it.
And this, above all, is why so many so-called journalists are so hostile to bloggers. Bloggers are the unwashed geeks who diametrically reverse that set of priorities, fixating on information of the greatest actual public import and generally shunning information that has little value other than to engender petty personality narratives. Blogger journalists make mainline journalists look bad, and they know it.