http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/us/politics/14web-seelye.html
The New York Times
April 14, 2008
On Line
Blogger Is Surprised by Uproar Over Obama Story, but Not Bitter
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
The back story of how Senator Barack Obama's comments about small-town
voters became news is getting almost as much attention in the
blogosphere as the comments themselves.
Mayhill Fowler, a blogger for OffTheBus.net, a Web site published by
Huffington Post and created by Arianna Huffington and Jay Rosen, was
the first to report Mr. Obama's comments -- that small-town voters
bitter over their economic circumstances, cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who arent like them as a way to explain their
frustrations.
The comments created an instant sensation in the media and Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton seized on them, hoping they would slow Mr.
Obama's momentum in the polls against her in Pennsylvania, which votes
in 8 days. If Pennsylvania rejects Mr. Obama by a big margin, and
voters in Indiana and North Carolina follow suit, the comment could be
seen as the game-changer.
Ms. Fowler told me in an interview Sunday night that she was initially
reluctant to write about what Mr. Obama had said because she actually
supports him -- which partly explains why she was at the fund-raiser in
the first place and why there was a four-day delay between the event
and the publication of her post. Ultimately, she said, she decided that
if she didn't write about it, she wouldn't be worth her salt as a
journalist.
Some Obama supporters in the blogosphere were up in arms at Ms. Fowler.
They doubt that she really supports Mr. Obama, have called her a plant
for Mrs. Clinton and suggested she was deceptive in getting into the
fund-raiser.
The whole episode gives a revealing glimpse into yet even more ways in
which the Internet is changing the coverage of politics. And Ms. Fowler
says she is surprised that she is playing a role in this revolution.
"I'm 61," she said. "I can't believe I would be one of the people who's
changing the world of media." But her experience raises questions about
whether the roles, rules and expectations for journalists and bloggers
are different. Can a person be both? Even Ms. Fowler acknowledged that
"clearly everyone is going to be re-thinking how they handle this kind
of thing."
For one thing, some Internet enterprises, unlike the mainstream media,
do allow their writers to actively support the people they cover: Ms.
Fowler has contributed money to Mr. Obama (and other candidates,
including Mrs. Clinton).
Ms. Fowler, who graduated from Vassar in 1968 and had dabbled in
writing, became a "citizen journalist" last summer when the Huffington
Post started "OffTheBus.net," a new venture that has now expanded to a
network of about 1,800 unpaid writers and researchers. I wrote about
O.T.B. in October, by which time editors at the Huffington Post had
already identified Ms. Fowler as one of O.T.B.'s "emerging star
correspondents."
Ms. Fowler has spent a lot of time (and her own money) following the
presidential campaign-- and participating in it. She has maxed out at
$2,300 to Mr. Obama, starting in increments last fall. She said she has
also given money ($100) to Mrs. Clinton, because she is roughly Mrs.
Clintons age and liked the idea of a woman president and she attended
two Clinton fund-raisers with her sister, a devoted Clinton supporter.
And she also gave $500 to Fred Thompson, of Tennessee, even though he
is a Republican, because thats where she is from and her family has
been steeped in Tennessee politics since the 1790s (thats not a typo).
As a supporter who had made donations, Ms. Fowler had been invited
before to Obama fund-raisers -- and written about them on O.T.B. After
the Ohio and Texas primaries, she was back home in the Bay Area and
heard that Mr. Obama would be holding four fund-raisers there on April
6. She had not been invited but asked a friend if she could go. She was
put on the list for the last of four events, this one at a mansion in
Pacific Heights.
There's a bit of a brush fire in California about how Ms. Fowler got
in, and Ms. Fowler is protecting the person who secured her a ticket.
That person has since called her and said that fund-raisers are always
off the record.
"This was never conveyed to me," Ms. Fowler said. "I was invited to the
event, I had written on fund-raisers in the past, why wouldn't I this
time?" She said the Obama campaign had never objected before to her
having written about fund-raisers (though admittedly, nothing much of
interest had happened). And the invitations said nothing about being
closed to the press. Besides, she said, several guests brought people
and children and who had not been invited.
"We had a fundamental misunderstanding of my priorities," Ms. Fowler
told me. "Mine were as a reporter, not as a supporter. They thought I
would put the role of supporter first."
Marc Cooper, who is the editorial coordinator of O.T.B., is writing on
his own blog about the development of Ms. Fowler's story and he
acknowledged that the campaign did not want the event covered. "It was
indeed a fund-raiser to which the press was not invited," he wrote. "Or
if you wish, it was closed to press. Therefore it wasn't on or off the
record. Off the record is when journalists consensually agree to
witness or hear something on the condition they not report it."
Still, he wrote, "Most if not all press was kept out of the room but
Mayhill was invited in. She was under no obligation not to report.
Obama was indeed more loose-lipped than usual. He should be more
careful in his choice of words when he is staring into so many video
cams, no matter who is holding them."
<snip>
Ms. Fowler said she found his response "professorial" and judgmental
toward blue-collar voters and that even though she supports him, she
was "taken aback" by them.
"I'm a religious person, and I grew up poor in a very wealthy family --
sometimes we didn't have enough to eat, but my larger family was rich,"
she said. Her father was a hunter. "Immediately, the remarks just
really bothered me. For the first time, I realized he is an elitist."
She also knew they could hurt him, so at first, she didn't tell anybody
about them.
<snip>
Mr. Cooper, the editorial director, describes her style this way: "She
employs a highly-personalized, reflective narrative style to her
unconventional reporting -- an approach that would be, indeed,
non-grata, within the official campaign reporting bubble. It violates
almost all of the conventions of traditional reporting (though not its
ethical code) and that's what makes it all so damn interesting."
He added: "I, personally, would have written her piece much differently
than the way she chose. It would have been less about me and more about
Obama. But Mayhill has developed quite a loyal and appreciative
audience and with her most recent work demonstrates that citizen
journalism can do many, many things still inaccessible to the M.S.M."
The post created an instant storm, garnering 5,000 hits immediately,
more than 50,000 more in the next few hours and topping 100,000 by the
end of the day. By then, Mr. Obama himself was talking about his
comments and Mrs. Clinton was activating her entire campaign apparatus
to try to exploit them.
The blogosphere swelled with outrage from Obama supporters. Ms. Fowler
said Friday was the fourth-most memorable day of her life, after the
birth of her two children and her wedding day.
Soon, the Obama Web posted a counter-description from another person
who attended the fund-raiser (without the quotes). The writer gives a
sympathetic explanation of Mr. Obama's comments and writes that Ms.
Fowler had an agenda; Ms. Fowler said she had no agenda except to write
it as she saw it.
Comments on dailykos.com became so furious that one poster suggested
that readers let Ms. Fowler off the hook. "No," someone else responded,
"if we let her go, others will do it... We've got to show the
`journalist' that they can't manufacture dissent. This isn't about
Obama, this could easily be a story about Iraq or Iran. This is the
type of disingenuous reporting that we have to stop. We need to make an
example of her."
Mr. Cooper continues to defend her and rejects any suggestion that she
had strayed into a "gray area" of journalism.
"What's gray is when a reporter engages in any level of deceit to get
the story or violates a ground rule to which he or she promised to
comply," he writes. "Not the case with our reporter, thanks very much.
She was known to the campaign as an OffTheBus reporter and they let her
in as such and she worked the room as such and she recorded the event
in the open as she sat with campaign staff," He adds: "They probably
let her in because they expected her to write unblemished pro-Obama
copy. Or they don't fully understand implications of internet age
information. She herself was quite conflicted about writing something
potentially harmful to Obama. But she correctly decided that the truth
shall set ya free."
He has been engaged in a dialogue with a poster named Bill Bradley, who
then wrote: "Marc, they regarded her as a pro-Obama blogger. Not as a
journalist or reporter or columnist per se. Bloggers are viewed as
activists, not journalists. It's why some campaigns have blogger
conference calls and press conference calls. The blogger calls are to
pump up the base. The press calls are to do spin and answer arguably
tough questions. She was admitted to the private San Francisco
fund-raiser as an activist blogger and then functioned as a journalist.
This is the gray area I'm talking about with regard to citizen
journalism."
Bloggers have certainly demonstrated that they can perform well as
journalists. (Remember the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr.? Or
Joshua Micah Marshall's coverage of the firing of eight United States
attorneys?) But is it possible to straddle the line between reporter
and supporter? Ms. Fowler said that despite the criticism, she is
certain that she did the right thing. "I'm totally at peace with it,"
she said.
By the way, if you've wondered why you haven't heard Arianna Huffington
weigh in on the subject, it turns out she's on a cruise in the Pacific.
She may not even know about the stir it has created. Consider the irony
-- her site gets perhaps its biggest scoop of the campaign and Ms.
Huffington, a vigorous promoter of the site and a constant presence in
the media, isn't around to enjoy it.
Update:Ms Huffington sends the following: "I was indeed in Tahiti, but
fully wired. Not only watching what was happening on our site and
everything online about Mayhill's post, but watching regularly updates
on CNN International! There was no escaping this story, even in the
South Pacific. As for my feelings about the political fallout, here is
my post from this morning."
Also, Mr. Rosen, who founded OffTheBus with Ms. Huffington, has written
his own account of the story and Ms. Fowler's unchartered role as a
citizen journalist.