A small, oddly friendly flap has been brewing between The Nation‘s Washington correspondent David Corn and the Washington Post‘s Michael Dobbs. On its face, the disagreement that the two have been hashing out on the letters page of online media news and gossip site Romenesko might look like so much media navel-gazing, but the issue at stake cuts to the heart of good journalism.
Here’s the story: Corn and Jeff Goldberg co-wrote a cover story for the latest issue of The Nation (posted online June 13) that detailed memos written by Mark Felt in 1972 and 1973 concerning his role investigating FBI leaks to Woodward and Bernstein. In the memos, an indignant Felt demands of his underlings that they unearth Woodstein’s FBI source. Considering that Felt himself was the leaker, the whole thing smacks of both audacity and high comedy, and it makes for great reading.
For his part, Dobbs wrote a front-page story for the Post this past Monday covering some of the same ground and using two of the documents Corn and Goldberg referred to — without giving The Nation credit for breaking the story.
Corn writes on Romenesko that he and Goldberg “first disclosed the existence of these memos,” adding that “Nowhere in the Dobbs article is there any acknowledgment that The Nation had unearthed and reported these documents a week before the Post published its piece.” (The Nation‘s PR director passed around Corn’s missive to journalists via email yesterday, helpfully noting where to send contributions to the Romenesko letters thread.)
Doth Corn protest too much? Dobbs seems to think so, writing back the same day that “I didn’t credit [Corn’s] article in The Nation for a very simple reason: it did not help me in any way with either the reporting or the writing of my own piece. I don’t know when Corn ‘unearthed’ the FBI files he writes about, but I had located the relevant memos (as well as numerous others) during a visit to the FBI FOIA reading room a week prior to the publication of his article.”
Ahh, the old “You published first, but I started first” argument. We know it well. Dobbs reasons that since he was looking into the same angle before Corn and Goldberg’s piece hit the Web, there’s no need to credit them. What’s more, Dobbs points out, his piece is hardly a carbon copy of Corn and Goldberg’s. He uncovered new information and followed angles The Nation piece didn’t.
But the question remains, even if Dobbs didn’t rely on The Nation‘s scoop, should he have credited the magazine with breaking the story? Reader John Maggs comes up with a solution that we think comes pretty close to being the best course of action. He writes that Washington Post editors “could have said, ‘The two memos were obtained by the Washington Post two weeks ago but were first reported on in this week in the Nation.'” Easy enough, although the Post would have to admit that it failed to be first to print with yet another Deep Throat-related item — something we’re sure they’re not too keen on.
The issue of attribution has recently been in the news (tied, coincidently, to the Washington Post and Deep Throat, as well). Last week Alex Storozynski, editor-in-chief of the free paper amNewYork, was forced to resign after he was accused of failing to attribute information used in a June 1 story about Deep Throat. According to Newsday (which, like amNewYork, is owned by the Tribune Co.), some specific passages and quotes used in Storozynski’s story originally appeared in a May 31 article on the Post‘s Web site. Storozynski protested to the paper that “It was clear that those were statements from the Washington Post,” because he “mentioned the Washington Post three times” in the story. And while Storozynski alleged some higher political machinations in his forced resignation, the whole mess surfaced over the issue of attribution, or lack of same.
Every reporter wants to be out in front on a story, and is loathe to admit getting beat — a relic of the “scoop” mentality of the 1920s — but sometimes you gotta give credit where credit is due.
For our part, we got scooped by Timothy Noah on Slate, who wrote about this very kerfluffle late yesterday. Fortunately, we’re of the view that scoops serve writers’ egos more than readers’ needs. Besides, we had the idea to write this yesterday morning.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.