{"id":40802236080,"date":"2011-10-05T15:37:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T19:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/2011\/10\/05\/anatomy-of-a-rumor\/"},"modified":"2021-01-25T11:22:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-25T16:22:06","slug":"anatomy-of-a-rumor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/2011\/10\/05\/anatomy-of-a-rumor\/","title":{"rendered":"Anatomy of a Rumor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at PolitickerNJ<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

He meant it. The answer was \u201cno\u201d all along. But Gov. Christie made a couple of claims during the Q&A part of his press conference that bear further analysis. He said that the press was careless in how they reported this and that no one believes he stoked the media hype. I agree with one part of that but disagree in part with the other.<\/p>\n

First, it\u2019s clear that the press still doesn\u2019t understand what \u201creconsidering\u201d meant to Christie. He was not reconsidering turning his \u201cno\u201d into a \u201cyes.\u201d He was reconsidering whether he would turn his \u201cno\u201d into a \u201cmaybe.\u201d<\/p>\n

I know this may be hard for some to understand, but Christie\u2019s thought process is not always black and white. There are grey areas. The events of the past week gave the governor pause about whether he should simply entertain the possibility of running for president. He said he never moved off his \u201cno\u201d and I for one believe him.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how we know. In the \u201cmaybe\u201d stage of a presidential campaign, your advisors start putting out feelers to key donors and campaign operatives across the country, particularly in the early primary states. This did not happen. Many of those key people made ON THE RECORD statements that they never heard from Christie\u2019s circle. That means he never truly reached the \u201cmaybe\u201d stage in his thinking. Got it?<\/p>\n

Now, how about the idea that Christie \u2013 or more accurately his inner circle with the governor\u2019s tacit approval \u2013 didn\u2019t help fan the flames of the speculation that he was a \u201cmaybe\u201d? Well, that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n

Over the past year, any report that surfaced citing unnamed sources who claimed Christie may reconsider was immediately shot down by a definitive on-the-record statement by someone in Christie\u2019s inner circle, usually Bill Palatucci. That was true up until a week ago \u2013 the morning of the speech at the Reagan Library in fact \u2013 when the governor\u2019s brother was the last advisor to speak on the record<\/a> about Christie\u2019s lack of presidential ambitions for 2012.<\/p>\n

And then those sources went dark. We didn\u2019t hear from them again until today. Perhaps they were on a retreat at a Tibetan monastery and missed all the fun? But while they were silent, the same reporters who were quoting them on-the record to dispel the Christie rumors were suddenly using unnamed sources \u201cclose to the governor\u201d to keep the speculation going. Coincidence? Maybe. And then again, maybe not.<\/p>\n

Regardless, we already saw signals that the Christie camp wanted someone \u2013 i.e. the deep-pocketed donors that he was about to hit up on his cross-country fundraising tour \u2013 to get the impression he might not be a solid \u201cno.\u201d The TV ad by a supportive 501(c)4 and the Tom Kean revelation are all indications that the Christie camp wanted to keep that chatter alive.<\/p>\n

I really can\u2019t fault the governor for that. You raise a lot more money as a presidential possibility than as just the governor of New Jersey. The boatloads of cash he presumably raked in for other candidates will only help him further his political career when he calls in a favor down the road. And he is bringing some of that money back to the state GOP coffers to bank for his 2013 re-election bid. I don\u2019t have any problem with governor wanting to prime the pump. It\u2019s just that his camp\u2019s active participation in fostering this speculation was probably unnecessary.<\/p>\n

So, if the governor\u2019s inner circle wanted that speculation to continue, how was the press careless in its reporting?<\/p>\n

Up until the Reagan Library speech, Christie probably had not really entertained a move to \u201cmaybe\u201d status. The speech changed that. It\u2019s certainly understandable given the setting and the national attention it garnered. So he asked his advisers for some time alone to consider whether he even wanted to start the exploratory wheels rolling. Fair enough.<\/p>\n

That was the point, though, at which the anonymous source reporting flew into high gear. It seems as soon as one media outlet got an unnamed source to confirm the governor was \u201creconsidering,\u201d all the other outlets fell over themselves to get an unnamed source of their very own. [By the way, kudos to those New Jersey news outlets that had access to reliable anonymous sources but did not succumb to the pressure to use them.]<\/p>\n

In that frenzy, I don\u2019t feel that these reporters were as skeptical about their sources as they should have been. I\u2019ve talked to a lot of New Jersey reporters during the past week and I do believe they followed all the proper journalistic procedures about using anonymous sources. I am fully confident that these sources had proven to be reliable in the past and were in a position to know what the governor was thinking. [Unlike many of the national reporters, who might as well have been talking to Kevin Bacon for as close as their sources actually were to Christie.]<\/p>\n

Among those who did rely on unnamed sources, I don\u2019t sense there was enough skepticism about their sources\u2019 motivations. Why did these sources need to go off the record? Anonymous sources can have a variety of motivations. They may want to prove to reporters that they have access to information \u2013 everyone likes feeling important.\u00a0 They may actually have access to information that the public needs to know (think Watergate). Or they are using the press to float a trial balloon.<\/p>\n

We can probably knock out the first two and focus on the third. Fair enough. These sources felt it was in Christie\u2019s strategic interest to keep this story alive. But what exactly did they say to these reporters?<\/p>\n

Obviously, I don\u2019t have access to reporters\u2019 notes, but from their published articles, it appears that the most knowledgeable sources were choosing their words very judiciously. Christie was \u201creconsidering\u201d his earlier no. That was it. No more, no less.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Christie apparently had conversations with other Republican leaders about his run. No surprise there. But the sources must have framed that information in such a way that reporters got the impression that these leaders were actively trying to get Christie into the race.\u00a0 I suspect the words were parsed very carefully and reporters under pressure to \u201cget the story\u201d may not have spent as much time dissecting the language as they should have.<\/p>\n

So when Christie said no to 2012 once and for all, he used the opportunity to call the media\u2019s reporting \u201ccareless.\u201d And while he didn\u2019t mention Josh Margolin by name, the governor honed in on the New York Post \u201cexclusive\u201d that included a statement that Nancy Reagan was \u201cprodding\u201d him<\/a> to get into the race.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting about this particular instance is that Josh Margolin has had a good relationship with the governor. The governor was a major source for The Jersey Sting, the book Margolin wrote with former Star-Ledger colleague Ted Sherman. Christie even headlined their book launch party in March. So if anyone was going to get real inside information about this story, it would be Margolin, right? That\u2019s what we all thought, but apparently not, since the governor called that part of his story \u201ccareless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, I may be wrong about any or all of this (although I doubt it). But the point is, if the media gets carried away with relying on anonymous sources whose motivations may be questionable, they shouldn’t be surprised if those of us who follow this stuff closely become highly skeptical of what we are reading.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at PolitickerNJ He meant it. The answer was \u201cno\u201d all along. But Gov. Christie made a couple of claims during the Q&A part of his press conference that bear further analysis. He said that the press was careless in how they reported this and that no one believes he stoked the media hype. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":939,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40802236080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/939"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40802236080"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40802238012,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40802236080\/revisions\/40802238012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40802236080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40802236080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/polling-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40802236080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}