TPM Reader MD responds to my post below:
In response to your question, “Which press outlets have agreed to those conditions?” I think there are actually a fair number that would take those terms if it meant an interview with Rove — or any number of good sources of information within the administration or in Congress. Granted, you need to be someone close to power — a special assistant to the President would qualify of course, but also any number of press secretaries for the more powerful members of Congress, because agreeing to those terms largely means you’re going to get a background interview with the person in question. Which can be worth it, if they have good enough information to share.
In many cases, it may make perfect sense for a reporter to have a conversation on background so that the person being interviewed will feel more at ease and won’t have to constantly be on guard. Speaking on the record is a pretty big pain in the ass actually, since one slip and you’ve said the phrase that will be the headline. So this allows the interviewer to actually get substantive information, and if there’s a great quote that he’d love to print — either attached to the actual person or sourced to an anonymous official — he can ask afterwards and will often get what he wants. So this technique serves to grease the wheels of the reporter-source transaction.
That said, in this case it’s obvious that this was too big of a demand since Rove was actually the SUBJECT of the story, rather than a press flack who can give some good background and maybe even serve up a juicy quote. I can see why the Times would refuse his demand, but it is interesting that it would call him out on this in the article: this is something that happens in DC; by devoting a whole paragraph to explaining their refusal, it serves to embarrass Rove. Maybe this says something about Rove’s weakening ability to intimidate journalists into agreeing to whatever set of demands he dictates to them?
I suppose I mostly agree with MD as to when such ground rules would be acceptable, but I took the White House claim to mean that those ground rules had been successfully applied before when Rove was the subject of the piece.
