CURRENTS
Interviewing: Was This Food Fight Fair?
Off the record. Not for attribution. On background. You know what these stock interview terms mean. Or do you? Witness what happened when reporters for two top newspapers set the boundaries of an interview. It seems they were not on the same page.
In July, The New York Times Magazine ran a provocative cover story by Gary Taubes, an author and correspondent for Science, questioning the conventional wisdom about the role of dietary fat in weight gain. Sally Squires, a health reporter who writes The Lean Plate Club column for The Washington Post, wrote a sharp response to the piece, for which she interviewed Taubes at length.
According to Taubes, he and Squires spent several minutes laying the ground rules for the interview. They agreed, he says, that Squires would "check quotes" with Taubes. To Taubes, this meant that he would speak freely during the interviews and Squires would not quote him without his express consent.
The two reporters then chewed the fat for several hours, with Taubes believing that he was "protected, in effect." Four days before Squires's piece went to press, she phoned him, he says, not to ask permission to include certain quotes — as Taubes believed she would do — but to inform him which quotes she was using. That, Taubes says, was how she had interpreted their agreement.
Taubes went ballistic. His language during the interviews had been less than measured. He talked, for example, about a specific study not having "any scientific merit" and about a certain scientist having "made it [the data] up." Taubes demanded to speak to Squires's editor, but was told the editor was busy. "To feel the press used as a weapon against you is a horrible feeling," he says. "To be told that there is no appeal, that you're just going to get drawn and quartered . . ." The next day, Taubes sent a letter of protest to the top half of the Post masthead (including Donald Graham) in which he wrote that it would be "incomprehensibly naïve for any journalist to say such things" unless he believed they were off the record.
But were they off the record? To what, exactly, had the two reporters agreed? For answers, Taubes says he urged the Post to go to the tapes (Squires had recorded the interviews). Steve Coll, the Post's managing editor, says, "I did conclude, after conducting a review, that the ground rules reached between the reporter and Mr. Taubes were ambiguous." He adds, "That's not to say I accepted all the assertions that Taubes made."
What was Squires's understanding of the ground rules? She won't say. "I make it a policy never to discuss my newsgathering or the agreements I make with my sources," she says. "I've been reporting for twenty-three years, and in that time, none of my sources has ever complained." Her piece ran on August 27, quotes and all, although in what a Post editor calls "an abundance of fairness" to Taubes — and "in the face of his adamant and agitated demands" — the Post stopped syndication of the article and limited its Web presence. "This is a situation where there was plenty of hay made on both sides," the editor adds.
With hindsight, even Taubes agrees that the arrangement may have been less than clear. But he raises an interesting question: If it becomes apparent over the course of an interview that a source has the wrong impression of the ground rules, should you clue him in? "At the very least, it was a con," Taubes says. "At some point in the interview, Squires must have known that our understanding of the ground rules differed, and yet there was no clarification, no recourse." Coll says he regrets that Taubes was not given a chance to talk to an editor. "If he needed that recourse in order to have the issue reviewed to the greatest possible extent, it should have happened," he says. Ground rules "shouldn't be a game of gotcha," Coll adds, and "sources who have the experience or knowledge to participate in the clarification of ground rules ought to do so." In this case, however, experience may have been part of the problem. Coll speculates that "one reason the ambiguity arose is because both parties believed they had ample experience to speak in shorthand with one another."
While Taubes was granted space in the Post's September 24 health section to respond to Squires's piece — to argue the science, not that his quotes were misused — the experience has left scars. "I'm an investigative reporter who is now leery of talking to reporters," Taubes says. (All quotes from Taubes were "checked" with him before inclusion in this piece, per a very explicit agreement with this reporter).
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