It was a rare moment, a journalist and a politician actually letting their frustration with each other show.
In one corner at a Staples in Columbia, S.C., last week was Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
In the other corner - or more properly, sitting on the floor taking notes on his laptop - was Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson.
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Briefly, the grinding tedium of the presidential campaign was enlivened by something close to dialogue when Johnson questioned Romney’s veracity.
There was a schoolyard quality to the exchange - “did so,” “did not” - but it also raised real questions about truth telling and/or lying in politics and the role of the press.
The episode erupted when Romney said, “I don’t have lobbyists running my campaign. I don’t lobbyists that are tied to …”
From the floor, Johnson piped up. “That’s not true, governor. That is not true. Ron Kaufman is a lobbyist.”
“Did you hear what I said? Did you hear what I said, Glen?” Romney asked. He went on make the point that Kaufman, a lobbyist and member of the first President Bush’s administration, is a “wonderful friend, an adviser,” but that he is not running the campaign.
At the end of the You Tube moment, Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s traveling press secretary, gave Johnson some advice: “Save your opinions. Act professionally. Don’t be argumentative with the candidate.”
After that, Johnson, a veteran political reporter who has worked for the Boston Globe as well as AP, went back to his laptop and hammered out a story.
In it, he mentioned some other lobbyists within the Romney camp, including former Rep. Vin Weber, who is the CEO of Clark & Weinstock, a lobbying firm, and former Sen. Jim Talent, who is a registered lobbyist.
Johnson also included details about Kaufman, who is the chairman of Dutko Worldwide, a Washington-based lobbying firm.
Johnson reverted to reportorial form by laying all out all these facts in his story, but he took heat in the blogoshere for questioning Romney directly and aggressively.
“His conduct with Romney was outrageous and why journalists have a lousy reputation,” wrote one commentator on Dan Kennedy’s Media Nation blog. “Do good reporting, write it straight, and people will get it.”
Other comments backed the reporter. “Why all the angst about a reporter aggressively confronting a politician during a press conference?” asked one contributor. “I thought that’s what they were supposed to do.”
Kennedy wrote that in most cases reporters avoid calling candidates liars. Rather they resort to euphemisms, such as saying something was “at odds with the facts.”
And, of course, even in his question from the floor, Johnson did not call Romney a liar. Rather, he said that Romney had spoken something that was “not true.”
In general, reporters shouldn’t say in news stories that someone is a liar, even if it looks like he or she is, Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, wrote last year.
“Liar is a loaded word that presumes you know someone’s intent,” Hoyt wrote. “It could be used in an editorial, though I’d be reluctant to do it, but it should never be used in a news story, except when quoting someone.”
Romney may have had the last word (and/or laugh) by defusing the issue during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
“Well, you know, it’s kind of a normal thing,” Romney said. “These guys have a responsibility to be adversarial, and, you know, we don’t treat them real well. The guys that follow us in the presidential race come in a whole group. We put them in the back of the aircraft. We feed them lousy food. We wake them up early in the morning to go to events, and then as you’ll see in this clip, I think, we don’t give them chairs to sit on either.”
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