Babelmachine

Obama calls Kanye West "jackass": "Off the record" in the age of Twitter

Sep 16, 2009 15:43

Most people would probably agree with what US President Barack Obama called singer Kanye West after the latter ruined Taylor Swift's moment at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Obama's "jackass" comment, however, was supposed to be off the record, but it ended up on Twitter (the post has since been taken down). This once again shows the impact of New Media and microblogging tools such as Twitter on mainstream media and the rules that have governed traditional media coverage. In fact, the incident is provoking a debate on standards for journalism in the age of Twitter.


Here's an excerpt from the Associated Press report.

During what sounds like informal banter before the interview begins, Obama is asked whether his daughters were annoyed by West's hijacking of Swift's acceptance statement, according to an audio copy that was posted on TMZ.com.

"I thought that was really inappropriate," Obama says. "What are you butting in (for)? ... The young lady seems like a perfectly nice person. She's getting her award. What's he doing up there?"

A questioner chimes in: "Why would he do it?"

"He's a jackass," Obama replies, which is met with laughter from several people.

You can listen to the TMZ.com audio clip of Obama's comments.

The irony here is that while the off-the-record remarks were uttered during an interview with CNBC, employees of rival ABC News were the ones who posted the comment on Twitter. One of them was ABC News anchor Terry Moran who has more than a million followers on Twitter.

Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post story.

"Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a 'jackass' for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT'S presidential," "Nightline" co-anchor Terry Moran wrote Monday evening. Moran has more than 1 million followers on the microblogging service.

CNBC objected to the post, which was apparently from a portion of the interview that was supposed to be off the record. Moran quickly deleted the comment (although it still can be accessed online), and an ABC spokesperson apologized for the tweet in a statement first posted on Politico.

Moran "prematurely tweeted... before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again," the spokesperson said.

We can expect more incidents like this in the future as journalism struggles to adapt to New Media and maintain standards in a world of citizen journalists and microbloggers.

How will the old rules apply to these new channels? What happens to mainstream media concepts such as "scoops", "off the record" and "news embargo"? When sources are tweeting and posting announcements on Facebook before they even talk to the media? When employees of news organizations are posting updates even before the news desk gets a chance to edit the raw stories? How about bloggers, do they have the same duty to keep things off the record?

These are the issues that traditional and New Media will have to face squarely and resolve. Let's hope they'll have better luck than an entertainment industry that keeps putting up with jackasses.

Recent Comments

 

Most Discussed

 

Browse Archive