Kennedy website edits newspaper clippings

08/10/2005

Eric Black and Dane Smith,
Star Tribune
August 10, 2005

The headline on Mark Kennedy’s U.S. Senate campaign website, over excerpts from an Associated Press article, said he is “A Common-Sense Get Things Done Guy,” and the AP material under the headline made the case that the Republican congressman voted with Democrats on 10 key issues this year.

Missing from the story were 13 sentences in which Democrats and political analysts accused Kennedy of disguising a career of extreme conservative voting by only recently casting a few votes with Democrats as he prepares for a U.S. Senate race. No link was supplied to the original version of the AP story, so readers who came to this article via the Kennedy website might think that they were getting the AP’s portrayal of the candidate as a bipartisan moderate.

“Common-sense get things done guy” was not in the headlines that topped the AP story in most newspapers. That phrase appeared in the article as Kennedy’s description of himself and his Democratic votes. In the full AP article, Kennedy’s claim was balanced with a description by a Democratic campaign official of Kennedy as an extremist who “is going through an election year makeover,” also not included in the website version.

The AP is not pleased about the Kennedy campaign’s editing of the article, and its attorney in Washington called the campaign Tuesday afternoon.

The lawyer requested that the material be removed as quickly as possible, said Dave Pyle, AP’s Minneapolis bureau chief. “Number one, they are not authorized to use the content. And number two, if they were, they’d never be allowed to alter the content the way they have,” Pyle said.

Labeled as excerpts

Heidi Frederickson, who is responsible for the website, said Tuesday that “we’re checking into it and we’ll do what’s necessary.” She pointed out that the AP story in question and others clearly were labeled as “excerpts,” and she noted that many campaigns have links or summaries.

As of Tuesday evening, the AP articles had been removed from the “News” link of Kennedy’s website, but could still be found by clicking on other links.

Earlier, the Kennedy campaign website included more than two dozen excerpts from articles originally published by the AP, the Star Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other publications. In none were any unflattering or critical remarks about Kennedy included in the website versions, all labeled as “excerpts.” In all cases, the website included ellipses where material was deleted.

The excerpting from the AP story by Washington reporter Frederic Frommer was the example in which the editing created the greatest change in the balance of a piece.

The website faithfully quoted the top of the story, in which Frommer identified 10 cases of Kennedy breaking party ranks. Frommer cited Kennedy claiming that these votes are proof of his ability to work across the aisle,” but the website excluded the end of the sentence, which read “ ... but Democrats claim they’re part of a Senate-election makeover.”

The website version also eliminated an interview with University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs, who said that the votes fit a pattern of a conservative candidate trying to create a more moderate image in advance of a statewide campaign.

The Kennedy website also eliminated quotes from Phil Singer of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who said of Kennedy’s votes: “It’s a classic bait-and-switch: Pretend to be a moderate during the campaign, then when he gets into the Senate, continue voting the way the Bush administration wants him to.”

In some cases, deletions from articles simply took out material that was irrelevant to the Minnesota race. In others, stories were about general Republican legislative victories, and the deletions removed critical descriptions that provide balance. For example, in a New York Times story about the House’s recent passage of the energy bill, the phrase “despite objections that the energy plan was flawed by subsidies to industry and a failure to curb national demand for gasoline” was deleted.

An April Star Tribune article about former Sen. Rod Grams’ decision to drop out of the 2006 Senate race was edited so that references to Grams’ annoyance at GOP leaders for what he saw as a top-down anointment of Kennedy, and references to other candidates in the race, were deleted.

Political scientist Darrell West of Brown University, who specializes in political communications, said he had never heard of a campaign website that excerpted so aggressively and with such a blatant purpose.

Campaign websites commonly provide online links to articles that are favorable to the candidate, and no one expects a candidate to post an unflattering profile, West said. But Kennedy has gone a step further, he said, excluding all unflattering references on a sentence-by-sentence basis and providing no link to the full version of the article.

West described the tactic as risky, because it’s common for the media to review how a candidate uses this kind of material. “So you’re likely to get caught, and the harm to your credibility will be greater than whatever good you do by quoting the favorable portions of the news articles,” he said.

Campaign websites and those of elected officials and businesses typically have “news” pages where articles about the official or the agency can be called up, usually through a direct link to an unedited article or the newspaper or other medium. Kennedy’s most prominent Democratic rivals in the Senate race, Hennepin County Attorney Amy Klobuchar and children’s advocate Patty Wetterling, have news stories on their websites. Klobuchar provides direct links to the original source for unedited media content, and Wetterling provides texts of articles and direct links.

Many campaigns or government sites do some form of editing, headline-writing and labeling, or manipulation of media content.

Exactly what’s legal and what constitutes a violation of so-called fair use laws in website content and media linkage is not an easy call. “It is complicated, this whole area of intellectual property use,” said Jack Stokes, AP’s director of media relations.