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D.C. Confidential
By Christopher RomigLast March, as the cherry blossoms bloomed and Congress crammed before their spring recess, I took a bus to Washington, D.C., for my first journalistic expedition outside of New York. I was writing a story about a big, loud group of lobbyists, and they invited me along to watch them work the halls of Capitol Hill for two days. When it was all over, I went back home with a bag full of notes, writer’s cramp, and a little more journalistic wisdom than I had headed south with.
For me, the whole point of the trip was to sit in on the lobbyists’ meetings with Congress members and their aides. I wanted to see the posh interiors of those giant marble Congressional office buildings on Independence Avenue. I wanted to hear how lobbyists and legislators really talk to each other. I wanted explore the blurry line between the voice of constituents and the demands of special interests. Of course, I wasn’t there just to satisfy my own civic curiosity. I intended to publish a magazine article about what I saw, and I thought my role was clear after introducing myself as a reporter to every member of the lobbying group I met.
I filled up three reporter’s notebooks on day one. I was surprised at how much access the lobbyists were giving me, although sometimes they treated me strangely. Every meeting in the representatives’ offices ended with a group photo, and the lobbyists invariably invited me to be in it, like one of them. I kept refusing, but they kept insisting. It got awkward. To get out of the pictures, I started offering to take them, but that never worked. “No, you’re with us!” they said. No, I’m here to report. More than once, the main lobbyist I was following introduced me as “our fellow activist,” and I had to correct her. No, I’m a journalist. She even tried to get me to lobby with them. “Why don’t you give this to your local representative?” she said, handing me a folder of their lobbying materials. Didn’t she understand what I was doing there?
I assumed that the lobbying group, media-savvy and image-oriented, would wonder about the journalist in their midst. I assumed that they discussed me when I wasn’t around. Apparently, they hadn’t – until the middle of the second day. When I showed up for the fifth congress member meeting of the day, the lobbyists’ communications director was waiting for me in the hallway. She stopped me at the office door. “I wanted to make sure,” she said, “you know that everything in those meetings is off the record, right?”
I answered instantly. “I do not know that. No one ever used the words ‘off the record’ to me.” I was emphatic, but I realized that I wasn’t as certain as I should be. I stood my ground anyway. “There’s no way I would have come all the way to Washington and openly taken notes in reporter’s notebooks for two days if I thought I couldn’t use any of it,” I told her.
“Then you shouldn’t go to this meeting,” she said. I walked away.
Now I was really confused. I sat in a park across from the Senate office buildings and called my professor back in New York. As he answered, John Kerry walked by. “Oh look, there’s John Kerry,” I said. “Loser!” yelled my professor.
I explained my predicament. First, could they really call things off the record after the fact? “Too late!” he said gleefully. My real problem was stickier. I had gotten what I needed from the meetings, but I needed to keep my access to the lobbying group to finish my story. I felt sure they thought of me as poison now. And anyway, I even had some sympathy for the lobbyists. They clearly hadn’t thought through my presence. I did want to use some material that I was sure they would find embarrassing, but it wasn’t my goal to screw them over. How hard line should I be about using material from the meetings? “Some journalists are purists on this,” my professor said, “but I don’t see anything wrong with striking a compromise.”
Later that night, the lobbyists were having a snacks-and-beer reception to unwind after 48 hours of democratic activity. I did not want to go, but I knew I needed to resolve the situation, the sooner the better.
Feeling radioactive, I approached the main lobbyist I’d been following. I was glad I’d stood firm. It was clear that she knew I could use anything from the meetings I wanted. If I had backed down when the communications director confronted me, I would have lost it all. She explained that she was getting heat from her bosses for not laying any ground rules with me. She had a proposal: if I ended up using anything specific from the meetings, would I run it by them, so they’d know what I was using? That was fine with me. I agreed, and got out of there before she tried to renegotiate.
I thought about what I could have done differently. Aside from writing PRESS on my forehead with a Sharpie, I don’t know how I could have made it any clearer that I was there as a reporter. The next day, I met a veteran Washington journalist, and told her about my predicament. She laughed. “People in D.C. try to pull that all the time,” she said.
For more on the power of “off the record”: http://www.mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a617.asp As for what “off the record” really means, apparently even the pros get confused: http://www.slate.com/id/1003063/
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