Washington Confidential A Double Standard Gives Way to The People’s Right to Know

For more than two decades, a highlight of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' (ASNE) annual convention, typically held in Washington, D.C., was the off-the-record briefings members received from top government officials. These discussions, held behind closed doors but in plenary session, can be documented as early as 1930 with an appearance by President Herbert Hoover and later included audiences with Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower; Vice President Richard Nixon; cabinet members, federal agency directors, and their staffs; and various military leaders in World War II and the Korean War, including General George Marshall.1 When the ASNE finally abandoned the practice during the 1950s, many editors were concerned less with the ethical implications of their organization concealing news about government from the public than about the impracticality of holding confidential discussions attended by several hundred editors and their guests.2Notably, the off-the-record tradition at ASNE conventions emerged shortly after the organization's Canons of Journalism, adopted in 1922 as one of the profession's first ethics codes, established the newly founded ASNE as a standard bearer for press conduct. The ASNE's first president, Casper Yost, editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, conceptualized the organization as a corrective for the lax professionalism that had invited public criticism of journalism in the early years of the 20th century.3 "His dream was the creation of an ethical organization of American newspaper editors," wrote Malcolm Bingay (1946) of the Detroit Free Press, another charter member. "He wanted to see them banded together on the common ground of high purpose" (p. 5). Instead, editors in coming decades would ignore the incompatibility of their off-therecord briefings by government officials with the press's democratic mandate to inform the electorate. Moreover, many editors would rationalize the practice even as the ASNE began, after World War II, to decry government secrecy and champion freedom of information (FOI), and as some newspapers prohibited their reporters from entering into off-the-record agreements with sources. Eventually, however, when considered alongside the ASNE's growing commitment to FOI, the off-the-record sessions would become indefensible. This, then, is the story of the editors' professional evolution, from embrace of a double standard that privileged uncritical self-interest to activism for open government in service to the public.Journalists historically have entered into confidences to obtain information from reluctant sources, and such agreements, though sometimes controversial, do not necessarily raise questions of ethics or professionalism. In contrast, the ASNE's practice assumed that a convention audience of editors and their guests, many unaffiliated with journalism, were entitled to off-the-record briefings by government officials and could be expected to withhold the information from other citizens. The sessions appeared not to advance the reporting of the news for the public's benefit, but merely to give ASNE members who traveled to their annual convention from across the country-most of whom managed newsrooms that did not directly cover the White House, Congress, or wars-a sense of being Washington insiders. Nowhere in the available archive regarding ASNE members' defense of the practice do editors say why the sessions were professionally valuable. The record contains no evidence that editors believed the mass off-the-record briefings contributed to their newspapers' reporting or enriched their editorial pages. Even for those editors whose newspapers did report news from the nation's capital and for which a benefit might be construed, the usefulness of the offthe-record sessions with federal officials was questionable. Not only were their papers prohibited from reporting on the contents of off-the-record briefings, but the closeddoor sessions with newsmakers rarely revealed anything new. …