No. As professor and writer Samantha Powers found out last week, you can’t do it. There is no off the record.
Powers, an adviser to Barack Obama, was quoted in The Scotsman as saying of the Hilary Clinton campaign “They’re obsessed…she’s a monster..and that’s off the record.” That late defense didn’t work; she ended up resigning from the campaign and apologizing. Her unfortunate but newsworthy comment also overwhelmed Powers’ actual agenda–to use the press to promote her new .
As a media trainer for many international companies, “everything you say is on the record” is a key point I try to pound home with impressionable young product managers and less-impressionable, ‘know-it-all’ senior management. They blanch when I tell them, “If you’re drinking with a journalist until 3AM at a Las Vegas trade show, anything he remembers will be on the Web the next day.”
If you are going to talk to the press, understand they’ll use your quotes if they’re interesting. And don’t expect to be able to take back your words; if Powers had called Hilary a “monster” on live television, whether she took it back or not, there’s no doubt that it would be on the record.
When Tucker Carlson challenged Scotsman reporter Gerri Peev for not heeding Powers’ plea to ignore her ‘monster’ comment, Gerri Peev asked, “Are you really that acquiescent in the United States? In the United Kingdom, journalists believe that on or off the record is a principle that’s decided ahead of the interview.”
Carlson may be right when he implies the UK press would sell out its mother to get a story. Cutting their teeth chasing royals, the Brits are bolder. When I worked at the National Enquirer (and made the near-fatal mistake of trying to keep up drinking with them) the unofficial motto seemed to be ‘if you need some shit get a Brit’.
But while Peev may seem like a nasty piece of work, she’s just a tough-minded journalist “If this is the first time that candid remarks have been published about what one campaign team thinks of the other candidate, then I would argue that your journalists aren’t doing a very good job of getting to the truth.”
That elusive truth is what journalists dig for. And that’s why there’s no such thing as “off the record.”