On the Accountability of Unnamed Public Relations Spokespeople

Saturday, 14 December 2024

Robby Soave, writing at Reason, “Pete Hegseth’s Acceptance to West Point Is a Story”:

Here’s what happened. On Wednesday, Hegseth posted on X that ProPublica — which he described as a “Left Wing hack group” — was planning to publish a bombshell report contradicting Hegseth’s account that he had been accepted to West Point in 1999.

Hegseth set the record straight by publishing his letter of acceptance, signed by West Point’s superintendent, Lieutenant General Daniel Christman of the U.S. Army.

But that article never materialized.

ProPublica’s editor Jesse Eisinger thus defended his organization’s behavior. “We asked West Pt public affairs, which told us twice on the record that he hadn’t even applied there,” explained Eisinger. “We reached out. Hegseth’s spox gave us his acceptance letter. We didn’t publish a story. That’s journalism.”

Eisinger is correct. ProPublica’s reporter did his job: He checked and double-checked a story. The mistake was made by West Point’s communications department, which twice contended — falsely — that Hegseth had never applied to the military academy.

In a tweet thread, Eisinger explained what happened. First, his reporter contacted the West Point public affairs office to inquire about Hegseth’s claim that he was accepted there. The reporter was told by West Point, in no uncertain terms, that Hegseth had never even applied there.

After being presented with unequivocal evidence to the contrary, West Point backpedaled. “A review of our records indicates Mr. Peter Hegseth was offered admission to West Point in 1999 but did not attend,” said the school in a statement.

There’s an argument being made (including by Soave, as his headline makes clear) that ProPublica should have still published a story about this, but that rather than it being a story about Hegseth having lied about being accepted to West Point in 1999, it should instead have turned into a story about West Point public relations having wrongly told ProPublica that not only had Hegseth not been accepted, that he’d never even applied.

I’m no fan of Hegseth, to say the least, but I concur that this was still a story worth publishing, albeit a very different one. The grievance wing of the current flavor of Republicanism would have you believe West Point PR deliberately lied to ProPublica. That doesn’t make sense to me. I do think it’s rather remarkable, and fortunate for everyone involved, that Hegseth not only kept his letter of acceptance, but had it readily available to scan and post publicly. That put the original story to rest.

But even if Hegseth didn’t have that acceptance letter readily available, and ProPublica had taken West Point PR at its word and published their turns-out-to-be-false story as originally intended — which could have happened simply if Hegseth’s lawyer hadn’t responded within the absurdly tight one-hour window ProPublica offered in their email asking for comment — the truth surely would have come out. ProPublica’s report — if they had published it — would have created a scandal, Hegseth and his supporters would have pushed back, and with the actual truth on their side, it surely would have come out. ProPublica would have had to retract their story, and would have damaged their future credibility, and West Point would have taken even more of a reputational hit.

But even if a West Point PR spokesperson, or even their entire public relations team, had been tempted to lie about Hegseth having been accepted, surely they would have quickly realized that such a lie could not stand for long and would, with certainty, backfire. Both West Point and ProPublica dodged a bullet from this becoming a bigger — and from their mutual perspectives, worse — story than it is now. This only makes sense as a mistake on the part of West Point public relations, not a lie intended to further damage Hegseth’s already deeply-troubled nomination to head the Defense Department.¹

But can I prove it was a mistake, not a lie? No. And even if it was an honest mistake, how did it happen? Who committed it? The answers to those questions would make for a worthwhile story to pursue.² And more specifically, the answer to who isn’t “West Point”. It’s a person or persons who work at West Point’s public relations team. “The Yankees” didn’t drop a routine fly ball that cost them the World Series. Aaron Judge did — and he has taken full responsibility and accountability for it. I think that’s who Judge is — the sort of consummate team player who takes personal responsible for mistakes and shortcomings, and defers to team credit for his personal accomplishments and successes, not the other way around — but it’s also the simple truth that we all saw it happen. That’s what makes sports so popular. It’s real, and we get to watch it all happen with our own eyes.

When a statement is attributed to “a spokesperson” from a company or institution, the world doesn’t know who that spokesperson is. Only the reporter or writer, and perhaps their editors. There is an explicit lack of accountability attributing statements to an institution rather than to specific people. We even have different pronouns — it’s institutions that do things, but only people who do things. Who is the question.

This whole thing brings to mind The Verge’s policy change on background sourcing three years ago. Nilay Patel wrote then:

The main way this happens is that big companies take advantage of a particular agreement in the media called “background.” Being “on background” means that they tell things to reporters, but those reporters agree to not specifically attribute that information to a person by name. Oftentimes, companies will make things significantly worse and also insist that background information be paraphrased, further obscuring both specific details and the source of those details.

There are many reasons a reporter might agree to learning information on background, but importantly, being on background is supposed to be an agreement.

But the trend with big tech companies now is to increasingly treat background as a default or even a condition of reporting. That means reporters are now routinely asked to report things without being able to attribute them appropriately, and readers aren’t being presented with clear sources of information.

This all certainly feeds into the overall distrust of the media, which has dire consequences in our current information landscape, but in practice, it is also hilariously stupid. [...]

This is bad, so we’re going to reset these expectations as loudly as possible.

• From now on, the default for communications professionals and people speaking to The Verge in an official capacity will be “on the record.”
• We will still honor some requests to be on background, but at our discretion and only for specific reasons that we can articulate to readers.

I’ve largely agreed with The Verge’s stance on this from the start, but I’ve also thought they’ve taken it to an almost comical extreme, insisting on attaching spokespeople’s names to even the most anodyne company statements. This West Point / ProPublica near-fiasco has me reconsidering my skepticism toward The Verge’s obstinacy on this. It occurs to me now that The Verge’s adamancy on this issue isn’t merely for the benefit of their readers. Putting one’s name on a statement heightens the personal stakes. This is why it’s more than vanity to put your name on your work, whatever your work is — it shows you take responsibility for its validity.³

Presume for the moment that I’m correct that this was an honest mistake on the part of someone at West Point. I can’t help but think they’d have been less likely to make the mistake — more likely to have double-checked whatever records West Point keeps about decades-ago applications and acceptance decisions, and thus to discover that Hegseth had in fact been accepted — if their own names were on the line, not just “West Point”. And even if I’m wrong and it was a lie intended to sabotage Hegseth’s nomination, it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone committing that lie with their name attached to it.