Responding to a video posted by the real estate mogul Donald J. Trump challenging the president to release his college records and passport applications in exchange for a $5 million charitable donation, Mr. Grove, an editor at The Daily Beast and a former New York Daily News columnist, pulled a rarely used card from the journalist’s deck: the media blackout.
“Effective immediately,” he wrote in The Daily Beast, “in light of your latest foolish attempt at seeming important, we will ignore you and your hot air for the foreseeable future — or, at the very least, until after the Nov. 6 election.”
Members of the media may declare blackouts for many reasons. Some are out of caution: in 2008, when David Rohde, then a reporter for The New York Times, was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan, more than 40 major news outlets refrained from reporting the story for seven months, until he and a local reporter escaped.
This month, NBC News asked other media outlets to hold off reporting that its chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, and his production team were missing in Syria where, it turned out, they were being held by a pro-government group. Most obliged, although last Monday, a day before most of the crew was released, Gawker, the media news and gossip Web site, posted an article that stated he was missing.
But more often, the blackout is more akin to a boycott that, when made public, can be a tool for media outlets or commentators to raise the level of discourse, to focus the public’s attention elsewhere or to glean some attention from those they are barring.
For eight days in 2007, The Associated Press quietly experimented with a Paris Hilton ban. “It wasn’t based on a view of what the public should be focusing on,” explained an editorial after the moratorium. “No,” it continued, “editors just wanted to see what would happen if we didn’t cover this media phenomenon, this creature of the Internet gossip age, for a full week. ”
It ended when she was arrested for driving with a suspended license, a violation that led to a brief jail sentence.
“One might call it a gimmick,” said the A.P. reporter Jesse Washington who, at the time, was the editor of the outlet’s entertainment department. He said he does not recall where the idea came from, but he petitioned his boss to put it in action, insisting that if something “really newsworthy” happened, they would cover it.
For the previous decade, The A.P. had been adjusting to an increasing demand for entertainment-related news. There was frustration in the newsroom about reporting entertainment news, but widespread recognition that the industry was changing and that they had to reconsider what was newsworthy.
“The A.P. was feeling our way through this transition,” Mr. Washington said. “What do we cover? What do we not cover? Do we dip our toe or go in waist-deep?” He went on to point out that reporters make decisions about what is news and what is not news every day, and that as the industry evolves, the types of news that are covered change. “Everyone knew that J.F.K. and Marilyn Monroe were sleeping together,” he said, “but no one reported it.”
Of course, the subjects a news outlet refuses to cover can vary greatly for any number of reasons, including the outlet’s particular audience and concerns of national security. And announcing a ban can be self-defeating, placing more eyes on the subject meant to be played down.
“In some ways, it’s commendable,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University. “What they’re doing is making public the criteria they’re applying; they are inviting the public to consider whether the criteria they are applying are valid.”
On the other hand, he added, “To say, ‘I don’t care what he has to say, he’s a clown’ — you run the risk of giving insufficient consideration to potential newsmakers.”
Even blackouts for security or safety reasons are controversial. At the time of Mr. Rohde’s kidnapping, Bill Keller, then The Times’s executive editor, told The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that although he recognized the danger of making the situation public, “it makes us cringe to sit on a news story.”
When Gawker broke with the embargo over reporting about the missing NBC News crew, the writer John Cook said in the post that the story had been reported by Turkish news outlets and that it was spreading on Twitter. He also wrote, to widespread criticism, that he was not persuaded by the network’s rationale.
“No one at NBC made a case to me that reporting Engel’s situation might cause anything concrete to happen to him, because they didn’t know anything about his current circumstances,” he said.
Voluntary blackouts at least seem more fun. Mr. Grove imposed his Trump boycott after the developer and onetime Republican primary front-runner spent much of the 2012 campaign season hounding President Obama over his birth certificate. The $5 million offer, according to Mr. Grove, was the last straw. “I just thought that the guy was constantly screaming, ‘Look at me,’ ” he said in an interview.
Mr. Grove issued a similar edict about Ms. Hilton in 2004. “In both cases,” he said, “there was a sense of weariness in having to write about these people.”
Bemoaning the “media obsession” with the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, Dana Milbank used one of his Washington Post columns to declare February 2011 a “Palin-free month,” and encouraged others — he named several commentators in various media — to join him. “I pledge to you: Sarah Palin’s name will not cross my lips — or my keyboard — for the entire month of February,” he wrote. “Who’s with me?”
“I knew nobody else would follow it,” he said in an interview. “The point was whether you could get through a month. I picked the shortest month.”
Ms. Palin — ever the apple of the critical eye of what she calls the “lamestream media” — appeared to be relieved. When she learned of the boycott eight days after Mr. Milbank’s column was published, she said she supported it.
“Sounds good,” she remarked, “because there’s a lot of chaos in Cairo, and I can’t wait to not get blamed for it — at least for a month.” Her supporters online, taking the ban as an insult, redoubled their fervor. One blog declared that “Sarah Palin owns February,” and another started a petition to declare February Reagan/Palin Appreciation Month.
Practitioners of media bans acknowledge their ineffectiveness. “Maybe if a news organization made that decision,” said Mr. Milbank, they might have a lasting impact, but “one columnist can’t alter the earth’s rotation.”
Mr. Grove acknowledged his announcements were self-serving, but said he would still point toward the results. “After all,” he said, “do you read much about Paris Hilton anymore?”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/24/business/media/news-blackouts-for-security-or-serenity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss