Damn right I taped Kerry’s “apartheid” talk, and I’d do it again

Josh Rogin:

Ten years ago, when I was a rookie reporter for the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, I looked up to Joseph Nye as a sacred figure, the preeminent American expert on Japan. So it hurt a little when Nye wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday to accuse me of “sneaking in” to a meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week in Washington, where John Kerry made explosive remarks warning that Israeli could become “an apartheid state.”

But I don’t blame Joseph Nye for accusing me of unethical journalism practices. He is not a journalist and he does not know the “rules” of journalism, both written and not so. I do. I’m a reporter. I know the rules and I follow them meticulously. In ten years of reporting for five different top news organizations, I’ve never broken an agreement with an official or a source and I never will. My living is dependent on that reputation and I worked hard to earn it.

If a reporter agrees that a conversation or event is off-the-record, then of course he cannot print what was said during that interchange. But the unwritten rule—the one that directly applies here—is that if a reporter enters an off-the-record event uninvited and has not agreed to the off-the-record terms, he is free to report what happens inside that event. It’s the responsibility of the event organizers to keep reporters from entering events without invitations. As long as the reporter does not misrepresent himself and does not attempt to conceal a recording device, the event is fair game. That’s the rule.

Did I enter the Trilateral Commission event with Kerry, tape it, and then reveal to the world what our Secretary of State is saying to influential world leaders behind closed doors?

Damn right I did.

Other outlets, including Politico, rushed to publish posts alleging I “sneaked” into the meeting and “secretly” recorded Kerry, based on the Nye letter. They reported “great frustration at the State Dept.” over the story. Politico also dredged up a story from 2009 when Jeffrey Goldberg accused me of being a bad Jew and worse for reporting on his interview of the Israeli ambassador at a local synagogue on Yom Kippur.

(I did issue a minor correction to that story. But on the charge of being a bad Jew? Like Hebrew National, I answer to a higher authority.)

The Daily Caller pointed out that even as Politico called me a “repeat offender,” its reporter acknowledged that although attendees agreed to keep the meeting off the record, “Rogin, who was not invited to the event, was not bound by this agreement.”

The Huffington Post pointed out that Nye didn’t actually present any real evidence that I was inside the meeting at all, saying only that I was recognized by a “friend” who was a member of the commission. The unnamed “friend” would not put his name in front of the accusation. Nye declined multiple times to explain why. But it really doesn’t matter.

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