´óÏó´«Ã½

Another question about journalistic ethics is raised by the resignation of Barack Obama's foreign policy adviser Samantha Power. Ms Power was born in Dublin in 1970 and raised in the United States, where she works as an academic at Harvard. She is also a very accomplished writer; her book "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. She visited Queen's University last week as part of her ultimately controversial visit to the UK and was interviewed on Radio Ulster.

In an interview last week with The Scotsman, Ms Power described Hillary Clinton as "a monster", then immediately claimed her comment was "off the record". Not so, according to the editor of The Scotsman, who ran the entire interview, including Ms Power's hurried attempt to take back the offending word. Since then, she has had to resign from the Obama campaign team and has apologised to anyone wishing to listen. The Clinton campaign have made hay with the comment for the past few days, and Power's resignation has been widely covered in the US media.

Here's the question. Was The Scotsman right to run a quote which was "off-the-record"? According to the newspaper, the monster-quote was, in fact, on-the-record because the entire interview -- as part of Ms Power's book tour -- was arranged in advance as on-the-record. When an interview is on-the- record, the newspaper can use the quote, even if the interviewee regrets having said what they said afterwards. On the other hand, Samantha Power was quick to mark off the phrase as "off-the-record" and therefore non-attributable. Unfortunately for her, she claimed that protection after having uttered the newsworthy word. Though, even then, the newspaper may have taken the view that the entire interview was on-the-record and there are no opt-outs permitted in the middle of the interview. It seems clear, at least, that reporters in the US may have a different approach to the on-the-record rule, and Ms Power may have thought that British journalists follow the same policies. British and Irish journalists often complain that their US counterparts are too deferential in their approach to senior political figures. Perhaps a different attitude to the on-the-record rule is partly due to deference. In any case, after the Samantha Power affair, I expect that interviewees on both sides of the Atlantic will be considerably more careful about what they say and how they say it.