Finally!

Well Hallelujah and pass the keyboard. It took a while but finally some one bigger than me finally gave more than a passing grunt to the “off the record” aspect of Easongate.

This one’s been a real bugaboo of mine and I’ve contended since pretty much my first post that the WEF couldn’t claim the discussion was off the record while a blogger on the Forums official blog and two reporters considered it very much ont he record. Jay Rosen finally picks up that ball and runs down the field a little ways with it.

On Feb. 7th, Mark Adams told blogger Tim Schmoyer that the discussion was held under the Chatham House Rule. It says: “Participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” No affiliations. The means you can’t say, “a BBC official on the panel claimed…”

Those were the rules, says the WEF. But the original report from the panel discussion in Davos–which did attribute comments to participants, identifying Jordan and others–appeared on a Forum sanctioned site, the exact title of which is: “Forumblog.org – The World Economic Forum Weblog.” It was a place where participants in the meeting could post reports and reflections. Rony Abovitz did that…

That’s a point I made earlier. Abovitz attributed statements all over his post and it passed apparently unnoticed by the WEF. But Rosen goes a little further.

We could say, “that’s one of the dangers of having amateurs who think they’re journalists, they get the rules wrong,” but for two things. First, the Wall Street Journal, in its Political Diary newsletter, got the rules even more wrong. Bret Stephens of the Journal’s editorial page quoted people at the meeting; Rony Abovitz of Forumblog did not. This went unmentioned in today’s piece from the Journal Editorial Page, which was partly about being a grown-up. (They’re not that grown up, I guess.)

Rosen misses Rebecca MacKinnon in this, but his point is still sound.

What he doesn’t note explicitly is that the issue of the “Chatham House” rules didn’t even enter the discussion until the day after Tim Schmoyer asked for a copy of the videotape. That’s when Adams told him of the off the record rule and that’s when this part of the story began to take hold as a real, but disputed, meme. If you recall, Schmoyer’s first post about the videotape on February 4 said that Adams was going to send it to him as soon as they unpacked it. There was no mention of any sort of holdup from Adams or anyone.

Then, on February 7, The Chatham House Rule raised its ugly head.

How did that happen? I don’t think we know for sure. But this is the crux of the issue, I think. This is the part of the story that matters in the long run.

And we won’t know until the Davos folks tell us what happened and why there’s still a dispute about the reportable nature of the panel.

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Category: Easongate