Take this on deep background only, please
by Matthew T. Everett
This summer, members of the Knox Heritage board invited Ron Watkins—of Worsham Watkins International and the (allegedly) $600 million plan for redeveloping Knoxville's downtown—to one of the preservation/restoration group's meetings. When Watkins arrived, he saw Matt Edens, attending as a board member of Knox Heritage but also a contributor to Metro Pulse. Apparently concerned that whatever he talked about would make it into the next issue of MP, Watkins declared the meeting "off the record."
But another member of Knox Heritage quickly posted a report—with no substantial surprises—on the K2K Internet discussion group, a move that was both criticized (as a betrayal of Watkins' confidence) and applauded (since it made a small, if ultimately insignificant, tear in the cloak of secrecy around the WWI proceedings).
The incident was minor, but it raises questions about the whole concept of "off the record." Did Watkins have a reasonable expectation that the meeting wouldn't be discussed, even on Internet groups, or just that it wouldn't be published in a newspaper? Did "off the record"—typically an agreement between a reporter and a confidential source, not between a public official and a group of concerned citizens—apply in this situation? Was it a bad idea for Knox Heritage to agree to his demand?
Unfortunately, that confusion about what, exactly, it means to go off the record is common. Public officials often use it to backtrack when they say something they might regret. "Don't quote me on that," they'll say. Or they go off the record just to dodge tough questions that they don't want to answer. But that's not what it's really intended for, is it?
"Unfortunately, there's no hard and fast definition," says Paul McMasters, ombudsman for the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center in New York. "It all depends on the practices of individual news organizations."
For the most part, "off the record" isn't, as it's commonly tossed about, a handy way for politicians or high-ranking executives to preserve their reputations. Confidentiality is traditionally reserved for whistleblowers and those who risk recriminations for the information they reveal. It's not to protect those in power from public scrutiny, but just the opposite—to protect regular people from abuses of power.
That's why protection of an off-the-record source is an essential part of any confidentiality agreement. Several organizations, like the Associated Press and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, as well as individual newspapers, have guidelines for using confidential or anonymous sources. What's common to all of them is that a reporter must protect his source, under almost any circumstances.
"[An off-the-record conversation] would be, if not expressly, then by implication, confidential," says Richard Hollow, a local attorney who works in First Amendment issues. "If I say something to you off the record, I assume you a) won't publish it, and b) if you're asked, you won't tell where it came from."
What good is information if a reporter can't put it in the paper, or air it on the evening news? There are actually several degrees of "off the record" to accommodate that: There's the strict interpretation, where whatever information revealed is off-limits; there's "background," where the information can be published but not attributed to the source; and there are cases where the information is just a lead and can be verified independent of the source, without revealing where the initial tip came from. But a reporter has to establish exactly what "off the record" means before he or she agrees to it.
"Understanding is everything," says Hollow. "The person may talk to you and may not say, 'This is off the record.' If they later say, 'All of that was off the record,' does that modify the earlier agreement? That's a problem."
It's a tough call. But not one that many reporters make lightly. The same caution may be prudent on the part of non-journalistic entities.
November 9, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 45
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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