The Trouble with Scoops

By Michael Kinsley

We almost had a scoop the other day at Slate, the online magazine I edit. We were all terribly excited. The adrenaline was flowing. This is what journalists live for: we were going to grab the world's attention, expose hypocrisy, rectify injustice and draw in new customers. And yet I was only half sorry when the story didn't work out. Scoops are fool's gold in many ways.

The basic premise of a scoop is that you're bringing important facts to public attention. Your philosophical touchstone is Justice Louis Brandeis' bromide that sunlight is the best disinfectant. But you spend much or even most of your energy trying to keep things secret. You're constantly swearing people to silence, making them promise not to tell others so that your scoop doesn't get scooped, and promising for your part to go to jail before revealing your sources.

"We're far more concerned that information like this can be leaked to the press without our authorization," said a spokeswoman for ABC News last week. She was referring to what Monica Lewinsky told Barbara Walters in the exclusive interview for which ABC had fought so hard. She claimed her concern was that the reports were inaccurate. But why should ABC care if other media get the story wrong? The network's real concern was that rivals were getting the story right: scooping ABC's scoop.

Much of the joy of a scoop comes from beating the competition. If TIME has a story a week earlier than Newsweek, there is joy in Rockefeller Center. But what service to humanity are you providing when you reveal some information that is going to come out anyway in a week or a day or (in the case of the Internet) five minutes? The scoops of today's leading scoopmeister, Matt Drudge, consist primarily of beating other media outlets to their own stories: reporting that someone else is about to report something. What's the rush?

ABC's Monica coup illustrates an increasingly common form of dubious scoop, as network newsmagazines proliferate and even real magazines compete for "exclusive" interviews with celebrities and newsmakers. The celebrity interview is exclusive only because the network or magazine has insisted on it or paid for it. Once again, the scoop consists less of producing new information yourself than of keeping others from producing it.

The scoops that come out of celebrity interviews are manufactured. The fact in question comes into existence only to serve as a scoop. There is tremendous pressure on the celebrity to say something interesting. How genuinely interesting can anything said under such pressure actually be?

This dynamic is best seen in the related category of the celebrity book. When, say, a former White House aide hires an agent to peddle a book proposal, the process resembles the legal "proffer" or plea-bargain proposal with which the Lewinsky affair has made us all familiar. The difference is that the client is singing for money instead of immunity. "For X hundreds of thousands of dollars, my client is prepared to say Y." Sometimes Y is an actual fact of historic interest, but often it is some unprovable bit of juicy trivia. ("'Divorce? Divorce is too good for you!' she screamed. Then I heard a crash...") And sometimes the scoop consists of nothing more than the former aide's willingness to express a putatively surprising opinion. ("He's a pathological liar, I now realize.")

Book and magazine publishers often follow a hypocritical convention of burying the scoop deep in the text--to signal that they're not really about anything so vulgar and transitory as news. Then they launch a publicity barrage, invariably including a press release written in traditional journalistic "pyramid style"--that is, with the scoop on top, where it belongs. ("ALBRIGHT SAYS CLINTON NEVER TOUCHED HER. In her just published memoir, Woman of the World, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright denies reports in former White House press secretary Mike McCurry's recent memoir, The Soul of Discretion, that President Clinton...") In essence the press release is the real reporting medium.

It is a bit hard to understand why this works. Why would anyone pay for a book or a magazine just for scoops you already know about from the publicity? But people do. Partly they've been suckered by the sideshow barker's trick of implying that there's more inside when there ain't. But partly there is pleasure in holding and owning something that's making news, even if it's news you already know. And journalists love producing scoops for something like the same reason. There's a thrill in being the first to report something, even if it's basically trivial, wholly artificial or soon to be universally known anyway.

Which brings up the worst thing about scoops: they come with built-in pressure to exaggerate their own importance. All scoops, even real and important ones, by their nature resist perspective. "In a development that experts say could revolutionize our thinking about toast, XYZ News has learned that..." No scoop ever begins, "In a development that may not be any big deal..." Thus what starts out as a quest for the truth often ends up just adding to the world's supply of dishonesty.